The Biscuit Joint

If Kirby gets away with a kind of uncontainable positivity in these poems, he does so in the same way that he gets away with an ode to his hands that, he seems to brag, “have caressed the bottoms of friends’ wives who, to their credit, turned/ in surprise and, on seeing it was me, smiled indulgently/ and went back to their conversations.” Cheerful and boyish, Kirby’s new collection of poems is titled after a woodworking technique used to create an invisible joint between two disparate pieces of wood. The poems flit seamlessly from a senior discount on a cup of coffee to a “guy out there named Señor Poetry. He’ d be at a table in a plaza somewhere with his wife and daughter,/ Señora and Señorita Poetry.” The poems are long and chatty, prosey at times, written as though Kirby was trying to keep up with some bright inspiration moving at breakneck speed. Kirby’s poem “Breathless,” also the name of a French film and a song by Jerry Lee Lewis, adds a hint of tension to the usual ease of his subject matter, asking: “how do you know when to stop?” “If these poems work,” Kirby writes, “they work best when they move the way the mind does.” (Aug.)