Bates fills her debut with intense imagery and surprising truths that arise from looking unflinchingly at recollections. The collection opens with “The Dog,” about a horrific death rescued from bleakness by the lines “How easily/ I could imagine a version of our lives/ in which he kept all his suffering secret from me.” These poems are laced with quotidian violence (“As if the only tool I owned for finding truth were a knife”) and suffering (“Forgive me, I am still learning how to know/ when a human will improve a scene”), as well as an abiding interest in creatures from dead white spiders to missing mothers. The majority of the poems are one-to-two pages, though the penultimate entry, “Mothers,” is six pages and feels like a breakthrough (“It sounds like the heart trying to leave the chest”) into the final offering, “Anniversary,” in which the narrator wonders about a marriage: “What’s the name for the way we wake/ to sirens and each roll inward on the frame?” These yearning poems offer intriguing descriptions and insights. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 03/17/2023 | Details & Permalink

In this playful and haunting debut, Murray turns his gaze toward the ordinariness and expansiveness of human life. Murray’s poems defy convention, propelling down the page with generous narrative energy, spinning stories about characters—“Winston,” “Knut,” and “Segovia”—with the detail-oriented eye of a novelist. Other poems offer graceful lyric description: “Gulls conspire in the blue/ to descend upon a herring shoal.” In one, Murray questions: “Had he forgotten what age he was living in?” aptly speaking for poems that exist in and out of time, critical of the world they inhabit, yet focusing on sublimity that goes beyond the current moment. In the striking poem “Crimes of the Future,” Murray offers a litany of actions that might be criminal in some future time, such as “Conversing meanderingly for several hours on a weekday” or “Talking to a dog as if it were a human.” The observational and sympathetic power of these searching poems makes them hard to forget. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/17/2023 | Details & Permalink

This galvanizing anthology of poetry and short prose highlights experiences of economic exploitation and finds common ground across the working class. The editors’ introduction contextualizes the anthology within a larger labor movement inspired by the Poor People’s Campaign popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, which was reestablished in 2018 to prioritize the needs of the 140 million poor and low-income people in the U.S. Diverse perspectives capture individual struggles of the immigrants, nonwhite people, and impoverished workers who make society function, as in Sonia Guiñansaca’s poem “America Runs on Immigrants,” which concludes, “America screams Go Back To Your Country, Stop Stealing Our Jobs and simultaneously whines Where is my lunch?” Other poems, such as Curtis Bauer’s “Dispatch Out of a Language I Used to Speak,” illustrate how the body can be consumed in the mechanical processes of labor: “Stories of kids and men if not drowning in grain/ being caught in the center auger and the one outside/ knowing something was wrong before the corn/ stopped coming, by the corn turned red.” Danez Smith puts it succinctly in their poem “C.R.E.A.M”: “what cost more than being American and poor?” This is a memorable and timely book. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/17/2023 | Details & Permalink

In this exquisite and affecting collection, Shanahan (Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing) explores longing and alienation in queer and mixed-race contexts. With provocative and arresting language, he examines the ways in which white supremacy and heteronormativity make those who do not fit neatly into categories feel like outsiders in their own lives: “To speak at all/ I must occupy a position// In a system whose positions/ I appear not to occupy.” He writes of the subtle complications in his relationship with his Moroccan mother, who, unlike Charif, does not consider herself Black: “Over there, she was sahrawi, asmar,/ Even abid. Over here, Black.// To her, Black meant African American,/ Which she was not// ...Hence the pocket of nowhereness.” “On the Overnight from Agadir,” the haunting poem at the center of the book, he details a visit to Morocco, during which he was involved in a bus accident that broke his neck, a near-death experience that caused him to examine his priorities and serves as a chilling symbol of the trauma surrounding his racial identity and heritage. Out of pain and loss, joy, sex, state-sanctioned violence, and nomadic longing, Charif constructs a comprehensive identity and an artistic vision that is dynamic and brilliantly conveyed. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/17/2023 | Details & Permalink

“Do you ever feel like an alien?” Callihan (Superloop) asks in her intimate and bracing latest. “I am feeling more and more like my childhood alien abduction dreams were actually dreams about middle-aged cancer treatment,” she writes. Throughout this collection, which chronicles the speaker’s breast cancer diagnosis and resulting treatment during the pandemic, Callihan skillfully weaves narrative and lyric, humor and pathos, fragments and philosophical musings. In one poem, she wonders, “What comes after/ the after?” While many entries take the form of prose blocks or lyric essays, Callihan also invents forms, like the associative sequence “The Paper Anniversary,” each section of which opens identically, then diverges according to sound: “Paper gowns are not as soft.../ as water/ as the eyelashes of my daughter.” The speaker’s husband, children, mother, friends, cab drivers, doctors, and various medical personnel populate these pages, ultimately revealing that the speaker is surrounded by love. Meanwhile, instead of the usual medical pain scale, Callihan defiantly proposes “a pleasure scale, and not moderate pleasure, I want/ severe. Severed but raptured. Not comfort but pleasure./ Pure unadulterated pleasure. Ten, I want to say, ten.” This beautiful, memorable book makes room for the complete range. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/17/2023 | Details & Permalink

Sysko’s witty debut skewers the patriarchy in poems that explore and upend the various societal roles women are expected to play. In sections named after stages of the female life cycle, such as “The Maiden” or “The Crone,” Sysko uses her impressive observational gifts and knack for finding the humor in the absurd to deconstruct stereotypes and present more authentic ways of expressing womanhood. Some entries capture the strangely nostalgic desire of children “brandishing hairbrush microphones/ like ambitious witches, gripping candy cigarettes” to play at adulthood. Others reinterpret the canon of Western art to dismantle the male gaze, but the irreverent poem “M.I.L.F” gets a hilarious rise out of the speaker’s experience of being ogled at a gas station: “His thoughts’ transit/ from M to F/ seems quick,/ prematurely coming/ without verification/ of my M status/ or the length, depth, or/ breadth of his own L.” As the collection enters “The Crone” phase, Sysko’s speaker reframes negative stereotypes in provocative ways: “Let’s be the type of witch who// sympathizes with the cauldron,/ —sinew to slime—,// forced to contain/ whatever’s considered/ appalling.” This whip-smart collection is a playful celebration of feminine power. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/17/2023 | Details & Permalink

This verbally and visually stirring outing from Shockley (Semiautomatic) offers a rewarding mix of short and long poems, elegies and odes, images, repetitions, and “conversations” with writers and artists. The expansive “we” in this collection is paramount, encompassing a mighty chorus of “I”s. Shockley’s poems are risk-taking and significant as they explore how society’s expectations and suppositions cage individuals into categories that squash individual narratives: “a woman is innocent until proven/ angry. a man is innocent until/ he fits the profile. a child is/ innocent until she sees her mother/ or father in cuffs. can’t unsee.” Within Shockley’s investigation is a lush desire for intimacy and connection—that “we” that is so critical, especially today: “the question is: who was i when we last hugged so close our bones met? where are the coffee spoons of yesteryear? i’ve measured out my life in package deliveries and what’s in bloom... if you can locate my whenabouts on a calendar, come get me. i don’t know where i’m going, but i need a ride.” This collection is a welcome companion for that ride as it celebrates the collective, the “we” that is vital to survival. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/17/2023 | Details & Permalink

In her shining fifth collection (after Soft Targets), Landau chooses the somewhat unexpected acrostic form as a container for her punchy riffs on modern life. Spelling “skeleton” down the left margin, these poems wield a lightness of tone with subject matter that has preoccupied her across several books: mortality inching ever closer. The fixed starting letters, especially the less common k and o, free and challenge Landau, and some of her best and most playful moments spring from these beginnings, as words like kabbalah, klutzes, ogling, and oy vey find their way into the poet’s lexicon. The “Skeleton” acrostics are particularly powerful when Landau’s idiomatic language is applied to surprising referents. For example, describing pregnancy, Landau addresses her body parts directly: “Bye-bye, ankles. Nice knowing you, feet.” Another poem opens, “Summer dark found us binge-watching the Perseid,” her repurposing of streaming lingo toward the natural world uncomfortably revealing how modern viewers take in content of all kinds. Interspersed between the “Skeleton” acrostics are several poems titled “Flesh,” which have a tone that feels less fragmented and more direct, as when Landau writes, “Will we ever run out of days? Who cares to count./ To say there are maybe thirty more Christmases,/ if we’re lucky, thirty more Julys.” These poems unfurl a resonant commentary on loneliness and mortality. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/17/2023 | Details & Permalink

Bozicˇevic (Joy of Missing Out) explores love, time, and dream imagery with sensuality and a droll edge in her whimsical latest. These poems consider loneliness versus intimacy, surrender versus resistance, and idealism versus reality, exhibiting how one’s emotions exist in a perpetual and necessary state of flux. Bozicˇevic renders the experience of all-consuming romance, the indelible marks of grief, and the restitution of humor for overwrought desire: “I see your face// in clouds & in stucco/ car alarms are bleating/ your name/ I stayed home/ & danced with a potato/ that looks like you.” Many of these poems evoke surrealist details: “When you left I sat on the curb/ Smoked one/ Then reached into my throat and/ Pulled out the moon/ Threw it into the trash and walked away.” At other times, she butters the banal with bittersweet sardonicism: “Your dream is the piece of toast you left in the toaster this/ morning.” Championing the confessional voice with dynamic lyricism, Bozicˇevic offers sonorous texture, rollicking conceits, and unparalleled vision. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/17/2023 | Details & Permalink

The atmospheric, untitled poems of Gill’s latest (after Spawn) reflect on her relationship to language (“Even as dreams lose their contours, this practice gleams/ solid—the materiality of words. I know what to do and not/ do. I have the manual for these things, the rituals”) as well as heartbreak and post-breakup contemplation: “Where do I even begin to switch off my hopes, slow down my hamster, become at one with everything that struggles to survive.” Gill’s wry voice is evident throughout: “It’s a love story like all my others/ a bus marked Select/ with nobody on board” and “I’m haunted by all the space that I will live without you:/ even the effing poems of Brautigan.” The sparseness of these micropoems amplifies their surrealist descriptions, “Kissing: it’s just like the movies. You take off slowly, float toward the gym ceiling, get tangled in championship banners from bygone years.” Miller’s translation skillfully delivers the energy and pacing of Gill’s ruminative poems, though one occasionally wishes these poems were more fully developed past their impressionistic, conversational mode to offer deeper, more conclusive insights. Still, these pages full of irreverent musings deliver affecting details and candor. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/17/2023 | Details & Permalink