Particle and Wave

"We need new art," Landry asserts in his debut collection, "And I don't mean a resin toilet./ And I don't mean another naked conversation with the artist." He continues in manifesto-like tone: "The children whose work it is/ to take apart CPUs/ demand new meaning,/ new treatment." In poems named for elements in the periodic table, Landry shifts freely but delicately from image to image, like the "painter of bottles" who works with "brushes/ of eyelash." Throughout the poems, selves are fluid and the distinctions between "I," "we," and "you" are blurred or effaced%E2%80%94object becoming subject; subject, object. "We arose from each other in a scattering of articles%E2%80%94a, the, an%E2%80%94definite bodies in the indefinite morning." Just as the book's title underscores the power of observation%E2%80%94light becoming particle when observed directly; as a wave, indirectly%E2%80%94readers might observe that a poetry mimicking the essentially arbitrary movement of elemental particles might be, in itself, also essentially meaningless: "Ghosts full of advice," he writes, in Silicon, "appeared among the villagers.// The mountain sloughed minerals,/ altering the coast." But when energy does not escape from his fissions and fusions, Landry succeeds in creating a new lyricism of the magical and the absurd. (Apr.)