Gathering selections from eight previous books, including The Voice of Sheila Chandra, this dazzling retrospective showcases Ali’s multifaceted voice in poems of lyric daring. Ali’s linguistic interests are seemingly infinite—from the Vedas to the roots of English and Arabic—but common threads reach across the poems, including migration, prayer, and the creative act itself. The initial lines of “Travel”—“Soon to leave/ Soon across the water/ Prepare the white clothes”—give a glimpse into the poet’s preoccupation with movement through space, while the command to “prepare” adds to the mystery and spiritual register. Many poems explore the line between human and celestial spheres: “Speak in the language of myth and flowers if you must/ But translate it at least for the stone and dust.” History weaves its way thoughtfully throughout, as in this stanza from “Junipero Serra Arrives,” one of the 35 new poems that close out the collection: “In a Spain lost to inquisition/ Swept away that golden Jewish/ and Muslim age in wind and sun/ All its sea words blue and mispronounced/ From books that did not belong were miswritten/ The mosque roofs grow moss.” Contemplative yet grounded, these poems form surprising and impactful connections. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/15/2023 | Details & Permalink

This welcome gathering of new and selected poems honors Jackson’s generous poetic imagination. Beginning with a selection of new poems, the collection primarily highlights Jackson’s five previous books (The Absurd Man being the most recent). The original pieces demonstrate the poet’s mastery of perspective, moving easily from personal reflection to direct address: “My font of feelings is a waterfall and I live/ as if no toupees exist on earth or masks that silence/ the oppressed.... So, look at me standing on the porch laughing/ at the creek threatening to become a raging river.” Poems from Jackson’s first book, Leaving Saturn, presage the observational skills that give his poems such depth: “I am going to stand beside the man who works all day combing/ his thatch of gray hair corkscrewed in every direction./ I am going to pay attention to our lives/ unraveling between the forks of his fine-tooth comb.” Jackson’s inviting, often playful tone makes readers feel at home in his capacious poetic world, as in the later selection, “Major and I”: “...he lives year-round/ in the bootcamp of self-redemption;/ for this other Major needs lots/ of sky. You are that sky.” Full of insight and warmth, these poems shine. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/15/2023 | Details & Permalink

“The weighted/ desert with its endless edges” plays a central role in Camp’s image-rich latest (after Took House). This inhospitable terrain comforts and sustains, even while it is freighted with failure: “That’s what emptiness has become./ There’s a constant gristle of air./ A stone moon parties the dark./ Around us a perfect landscape of ruins.” If “a desert takes what staggers to it,” it also suggests survival in “every green impulse,/ every desperate step,” and in the water that “chases itself, crying its name.” Having lived in New York, Montana, Massachusetts, and on the West Coast, Camp is now poet laureate of New Mexico, a place that echoes the topography of her Arab Jewish ancestry, which is briefly described. Camp applies a tactile and inventive touch to sometimes anthropomorphic descriptions: “Where the desert bakes its stones/ to old oaths, it is easy to count all the conclusions/ as seduction.” She evocatively describes a moment during quarantine: “I have watched thirty movies of sheep and fields/ spreading slow to the future, and of course I’ve stayed in my house./ Shredded to the country’s mortal glower.” Dryness is a powerful motif here, as is the spirit that echoes the landscape’s vulnerability and regenerative power. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/15/2023 | Details & Permalink

The excellent debut from Nathan is both lavishly granular and as expansive as the “wildered sky,” offering a complex portrait of place and belonging that overflows “the wooden bucket/ of nostalgia.” Born in Berkeley, Calif., and raised on a Kansas farm by his Mennonite Kansan mother and his East Coast Jewish father, the poet is a transplant “high-hearted and stunned to the root-toes.” With an archeologist’s zeal and a memoirist’s desire to plumb the self, his self-appointed “job today is to dig”: “I stab and sink my narrow spade/ through turf and root and worm and sticky clay.” He unearths “a past/ alive in the must and crushed in layers.” The book’s long centerpiece grafts Nathan’s own childhood onto the histories of landforms and of the humans and nonhuman beings that have moved onto the land: “I’m remembering that it wasn’t the land that carved me apart,/ but a system of culture, a school of/ flak from an elder if you couldn’t pull a straight furrow.” Elsewhere, he suggests an analogy between his own poetic lines (“like creeks across pastures, beneath a huge sun/ of remembering”) and marks made by the “unremitting blade” of the road-grader. Nathan’s language savors sound: “stinging nettles, sneezeweed and terse breezes.” Sensuous pleasures and fresh revelations will reward readers hungry for the arrival of a significant new voice. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/15/2023 | Details & Permalink

In Dougherty’s existential 20th collection (following The Second of Sorrow), he scrutinizes in prose poems the challenges of caregiving, the fleeting nature of life, and the profound moments that shape humanity: “I am old as any levee. The older I get the more I am enamored with the rain, the river, floods.” Reflecting on the contrast between rural dreams and suburban realities, he touches on themes of longing, loss, and transience: “I’d love to have been a farmer with a hundred acres.... The world turns and turns again.” At the heart of the collection, poems like “Written on the Back of Medical Forms” testify to the complexities of caregiving and its emotional toll: “What I have to tell you here has more to do with being human than with spirit.” Dougherty sings of the vast fields of sunflowers in North Dakota and the subtle beauty of tiger-striped butterflies, capturing the essence of life’s ephemerality. The volume is punctuated by moments of raw emotion, as seen in the poignant reflections on aging, the weight of memories, and the ever-present desire for connection. Readers are invited to contemplate the beauty and complexity of life, and urged to find meaning in both the extraordinary and the everyday. Dougherty’s vision is dynamic and brilliant. (Oct.)

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“I’m trying to say something that feels like hearing/ your voice for the first time,” writes Bolina (The 44th of July) in this elegiac collection. “It isn’t working,” he declares, though the effort allows for strange and delightful observations about fatherhood, Chicago’s dive bars, and the persistence of joy, even as “Bad News hotwires the buzzer,/ invites itself up with its bouquet of wild/ aneurysms and drooping embolisms.” A majority of these poems are elegies, yet while Bolina mourns, he is distracted by the beauty of each moment and the fun of language. In one poem, he reflects on a first love that blooms at Super Dawg, an iconic Chicago hot dog joint: “Endorphin, milkshake, endorphin,/ cheese fry.” In another, a nightmare becomes a trotting night mare, “her clackety wagon filled with snakes/ and shame.” “Second City Autumnal” flips the traumatic, tragedy-filled immigrant story into one that narrates the bustling normalcy of prepping food for a family visit, an act steeped in feelings of comfort: “And now who will tell her the city belongs to anyone else?/ And now who will say go back where you came from?” Bolina has gathered the mundane moments that make up a life and turned them into sparkling gems. (Oct.)

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The frenzied and meditative fourth outing from Lederer (The bright red horse—and the blue—) enters scientific circles of heaven and hell to consider the language of reproductive technology and genetic engineering. Readers may need to reference the endnotes to fully understand such titles as “fetus papyrus,” “autophagy,” “acephalic, ” and “chromosomal dislocation” (which causes miscarriage). The book’s eponymous engineers are biomedical, but Lederer’s view is cosmic as well as microscopic. In the sequence “Polar Bodies,” referring to cells that are produced along with eggs and that can be tested for genetic abnormalities, clinical language is set into rhyme and meter disguised by short, erratic line breaks: “First one, then two/ coronal loops,/ we bodied through,/ ambiguous./ The statues/ smashed,/ the crescents/ pushed,/ the laboratory/ nano-flares/ beneath the burning/ bush. And then/ we felt their/ soothing touch.” While the poems are at times a bit amorphous on the page, they gel when read aloud, at times channeling the cadence of nursery rhymes. One poem, “Chimeras,” even borrows its form from a popular children’s book: “Thyroid, thyroid, what do you see?/ I see a hydrops looking at me.” These stirring pieces offer a disquieting and original look at the reproductive frontier. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/15/2023 | Details & Permalink

The reflective fifth collection from Laird (Feel Free) continues the poet’s career-long exploration of voice and sensibility. Grief is the book’s central emotion and primary raison d’être: “I know nothing of your grief, granted,/ and you know nothing of mine, but isn’t that why we’re here?” At the center is a lyric sequence about the death of the poet’s father during Covid lockdown. Moments of vivid detail accomplish the work of memoir (“Elizabeth the nurse held the phone against your ear/ and I could hear your breathing, or perhaps the rasping// of the oxygen machine, and I said what you’d expect”), giving rise to larger lessons learned about “the rituals that take us” and the art that preserves such rituals: “An elegy I think is words to bind a grief in,// a companionship of grief, a spell to keep it /safe and sound, to keep it from escaping.” Other feelings weave around this grief, such as wonder at the sight of a sunset (“brilliant, splintered,/ overripe light toward animate clouds”), and the strain of ownership (“I was overwhelmed// then and am again by all the stuff, the bits and bobs, the clobber”). If at times the poet overplays his verbal wit, most readers will delight in poems that model how to attend to—and extend—“the custody of self.” (Nov.)

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Quintessential poems by virtuoso of absurdity Tate (The Government Lake: Last Poems) are woven into a whimsical, rollicking, and utterly jarring retrospective that showcases an unparalleled mind. Tate is famed for narratives that are set in the familiar and develop imaginatively, even chaotically: in one poem, strangers invite a jazz musician to a lavish party, only to reveal that he is their annual human sacrifice due to his lack of contribution to society. In another, an applicant interviewing to be an ice cream trucker driver is told that extensive military experience is required. Elsewhere, a woman instigates a bloody fight at her book club, then gets drinks with her victims. The poet explores social standards and fallacies, the terrifying beauty of nature, and what it means to live a life devoid of poetry. Tate’s effervescent imagery assuages the heart: “It is late morning,/ and my forehead is alive with shadows,/ Some bats rock back and forth/ to the rhythm of my humming,/ The mimosa flutters with bees./ This is a house of unwritten poems,/ This is where I am unborn.” Tenacious, surreal, impish, and soul mending, these poems invite the reader into a transcendent world. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/15/2023 | Details & Permalink

The title of the faith-inflected latest from Cayley (Other Houses) suggests the collection’s interest in religion, though it is just as fascinated by fathoming the philosophical dimensions and implication of domestic and artistic life. The opening poem, “Attention,” sets the stakes for this attention: “And if repetition could itself be/ a form of attention, folding along the crease/ until the crease finds itself/ hollowing out the groove, as in marriage,/ studying the same face, the same/ permeable body.” In the next piece, Cayley powerfully describes ice “thinned/ to skin” and “The frozen puddle vast/ as the ice over the earth,/ which once, perhaps,/ we all crossed” (“Ice Sheet”). Other poems feature prosaic declarations: “Childhood is a time of inexplicable passions. The genius or religious fanatic is tepid compared to the disastrous loves experienced by children,” and “As Henry James wrote, an artist is one on whom nothing is lost.... This seems optimistic: it is also true of sustained personal or political cruelty.” Full of delightful allusions to Sylvia Plath and others, these intelligent poems offer evocative and rewarding ruminations. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 09/15/2023 | Details & Permalink