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The exceptional fifth book from Chang (Barbie Chang) does not open with death, at least not in the way its title might suggest. It opens instead with a father’s stroke and the assertion that grief “is really about future absence.” The collection explores the newspaper obituary through prose blocks whose language moves between shuddering realism and more lyrical elaborations. One poem recalls: “After my father’s stroke, my mother no longer spoke in full sentences... Maybe this is what happens when language fails, a last breath inward but no breath outward. A state of holding one’s breath forever but not dying.” The sparser tankas about children and the future offer some of the book’s most exquisite and painful moments: “My children, children,/ today my hands are dreaming/ as they touch your hair./ Your hair turns into winter./ When I die, your hair will snow.” Chang’s poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2020 | Details & Permalink

The perceptive fifth collection from Firestone (Ten) reflects on its own movement through time, language, and experience, slowly revealing the story of a couple and challenging the implicit desire for a clean narrative arc. “Bodies sit down and language delivers,” she writes, wryly reminding the reader of his or her own expository impulses. Presented as a book-length sequence in which language alternates between quoted passages and lineated poetry, Firestone’s innovative structural device complements and further serves her project of interrogating narrative, highlighting how the storyteller borrows from a shared cultural imagination: “It was like this: she wondered is this my narrative?” In poetry that is as smart as it is self-aware, Firestone calls attention to the line’s own artifice: ‘“Line up thoughts, label the hours,”’ she writes, reflecting on her own impulse to name, structure, and claim ownership of the tale, despite the admitted impossibility of these efforts. This is a skillful and philosophically rich addition to Firestone’s stimulating body of work. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2020 | Details & Permalink

The 13 books from Berssenbrugge (Hello, the Roses) appear in this volume alongside Empathy, originally published in 1989. While the lines of her newest collection extend across the page, the poems in Empathy are broken into shorter lines, more traditional stanzas. For this poet, “love is a measurement,” meaning the crossing of distance or time. But, as the poet writes in a note that opens the volume, while writing those poems, she was already in the process of developing a new voice influenced by John Ashbery and the West Coast “language poets.” Some of those poems trace memories of China, where the poet lived as a child, while others evoke stunning New Mexico landscapes (she recalls time spent in a rustic adobe house without plumbing). These intriguing, beautiful, yet sometimes frustrating poems take shape as explanations that fail, again and again, to explain anything: “Her persistent observation, even after the frost, is of each leaf coinciding with its luminousness, because of its structure as a lighted space and which shows brightness in idea and form.” Lovers of the constellations and abstraction, however, will find themselves at home in the lyrical language. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

It is a hallmark of Carson’s style to leave the juxtaposition of two cultural entities unexplained. The latest stirring verse play by Carson (Nox) takes this practice to its extreme, crafting its title (and only) character by overlaying Marilyn Monroe and Euripides’s Helen, who went to Egypt during the Trojan War and was replaced in Troy by an illusion: “I never went to Troy, that was a cloud, don’t forget this,” she declares. Carson doesn’t attempt to create direct correlations, but rather compresses two women who both entranced the world to study loneliness, motherhood, and the motivations and costs of war in the process: “Hell smells stale. Fights aren’t about anything, fights are about themselves.” Carson wades through the implications of certain Greek words, generating some of her signature lyricism: “Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks,” she writes in “History of War: Lesson 3.” While readers will find themselves more readily oriented if they have some familiarity with both Monroe and the Euripidean Helen—especially when Norma Jeane’s daughter Hermione appears, having overdosed, to mark the distance between the two women’s lives—those willing to follow Carson will be rewarded with her ability to conjure a sentence and character beyond any illusion. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

In the shimmering fifth collection from Whiting Award–winner Jackson (Roll Deep), Albert Camus’s concept of the “absurd creator,” who creates “for nothing,” inspires a vivid travelogue from Xichang to North Philadelphia to Paris as Jackson’s speaker searches for meaning. Depicting urban scenes, Jackson recalls a “white-gloved/ doorman who opening a glass door gets a whiff/ of a dowager’s thick perfume and recalls baling timothy/ hay as a boy in Albania.” Elsewhere, Jackson’s eye is laser-sharp and wry, observing as “a drug-riddled couple/ shares the smoldering remains of an American Spirit... this city’s updated version of American Gothic.” Throughout the book, Jackson’s weaving of mythology and literary references serve as context for confrontations with personal ghosts, be they “his dead mother reappear[ing] in a storefront glass” or the grandfather who would “look askance at my treasured collection of stemless wineglasses// and fashionable ascots.” Jackson’s speakers affectingly embrace self-interrogations that reckon with “our affair/ far away from my wife and their husbands” or “my children whom I scarred.” In this accomplished work, readers will find that absurdity is only a stop along the road to larger meaning. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

Through recurring dreams that demand “You must know. Your history,” as well as her experiences visiting Cambodia, Sok’s reflective debut teases out how the trauma of the Khmer Rouge is remembered and retained in the fabric of the country and within her own family. Sok is a Cambodian- American child of former refugees, and her poems have the sharp complexity of a person who embodies multiple identities. “The Americans hate me and I hate them,/ but they’re the only students with me and maybe I’m American too,” she admits. In “Self-Portrait as War Museum Captions,” Sok steps outside herself: “A daughter of survivors stands in the grass among tattered military/ tanks. She is the only one in her family who wants to visit the museum. Siem Reap, Cambodia. Nov 2016.” Sok celebrates her grandmother, to whom the collection is dedicated, and who was a master weaver. This is where Sok’s quiet, unexpected turns shine: “It made her happy/ as she worked on silk dresses/ and her hair never ran out./ Sometimes when she was tired,/ she’d tie it up/ and let all the tired animals around her house/ drink from her head.” Weaving the threads of her family’s stories, history, place, and identity, these poems glimmer with strength and presence. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

With this tender and unflinching 10th collection, Hirsch (Gabriel) balances heartfelt elegy with a celebration of the everyday. In these 48 poems of sensory remembrance, any door might open on the past: “Yesterday I climbed the stairs/ and took the ‘L’/ to 1965 /where I was stuck/ in the heart/ of downtown Chicago.” While offering tributes to Mark Strand, William Meredith, and Phillip Levine, Hirsch’s speakers are ready to “let someone else/ stumble past the mausoleum/ and grieve/ under the calm shade.” Hirsch is interested in capturing ephemeral flashes of human vitality with a lyricism that rises from unadorned eyewitness. Yet his reportage is often framed in ironic negation: “Don’t hitchhike/ the Mediterranean coast/ of Algeria/ in the summer of 1971/ with only a worn copy/ of The Plague to guide you.” In another poem, he remembers a chance encounter with a skyscraper window washer (“I felt oddly gleeful/ when I saw him later/ coming off the job safely/ in street clothes, walking on ground”). While later poems address Hirsch’s loss of eyesight, giving resonance to the collection’s title, readers will be grateful the poet’s inner eye remains as observant and compassionate as ever. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer-winning journalist Griswold (Amity and Prosperity) examines the relationship between toxic masculinity, violence, and the creation of public narrative in her incisive poetry debut. Griswold suggests that the conventions of storytelling incite and erase violence against historically marginalized people: “Twenty men crossing a bridge,/ into a village,/ is not a metaphor/ but prelude to a massacre,” she warns. She highlights the way language distances viewers from the escalating violence that floods the news, suggesting various power structures inform which stories are told, and which elicit sympathy: “The Fox News guy slipping his phone number/ over the anchor’s desk,/ below the camera’s eye;/ the radio host calling her a failure for/ becoming a mother.” Griswold presents the news as inextricable from traditional beliefs about gender and power. Yet the speaker of these poems, “eager to share any awful story,” frequently calls attention to the variability of beliefs about storytelling, and it is in this instability that she discovers agency, hope, and the possibility of redemption. She writes, as though describing the movement of the poems themselves: “She was warden of an angry garden,/ guarding against what hoped to grow.” This well-timed exploration of violence and language is an exciting introduction to Griswold’s work. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

In this exquisite, electrifying collection, Diaz (When My Brother Was an Aztec) studies the body through desire and the preservation of Native American lives and cultures, suggesting that to exist as a Native in a world with a history of colonization and genocide is itself a form of protest and celebration. She explores this idea in “The First Water Is the Body,” cataloguing the destruction of this invaluable resource by those who seek to protect it: “in the U.S., we are tear-gassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling natives trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock.” But it’s desire, both in its erotic form and as present in the will to assimilate, that drives the book: “Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—/ and I am demoned by those desires.” “These Hands, If Not Gods” opens with a stunning lyrical address to a lover: “Haven’t they moved like rivers—/ like glory, like light—/ over the seven days of your body?” The elegiac “Grief Work” closes the book with a meditation on longing: “my melancholy is hoofed./ I, the terrible beautiful// Lampon, a shining devour-horse tethered at the bronze manger of her collarbones.” Diaz continues to demonstrate her masterful use of language while reinventing narratives about desire. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

In his contemplative fourth book, Clay (Stranger) draws from an impressive repertoire of forms to tease out complex questions regarding time, epistemology, and memory. “If measuring/ one’s life circular/ makes sense of movement,/ then how should/ we muscle meaning/ into days?” he asks in the opening poem. Clay’s philosophical concerns unify: “Where in a moment/ is the music of a dying leaf?” he muses, reminding readers of beauty’s ephemerality and the narratives people create in order to make sense of the world. Yet, as the book unfolds, Clay’s speakers transform this fearful impermanence into “a blur of accidental happiness,” discovering hope and fulfillment in the intricacies of human connection. As though reflecting on the movement of the poems themselves, he writes, “What starts off as nihilistic/ inside the folds of my thinking// usually ends up as stray/ unkempt optimism.” The work’s arc suggests transformation and redemption through formal shifts that amplify the meaning in the poems themselves. “Anything can change, after all,” as Clay suggests in this accomplished, formally dexterous collection. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink