cover image Tokyo Butter: A Search for Forms of Deirdre

Tokyo Butter: A Search for Forms of Deirdre

Thylias Moss, . . Persea, $24 (134pp) ISBN 978-0-89255-319-8

This eighth outing from MacArthur "genius" grant winner Moss (Slave Moth , 2004) is her most ambitious. Loosely organized around the idea of missing persons—Moss's friend Deirdre, dead in Italy; an abducted child named Cindy Song—these extended, long-lined, energetically digressive poems yearn to connect everything to everything else: "any surface revealed by delving is the outside/ of something also a gate and trapdoor." Carnival games of whack-a-mole, older women's wombs, space stations, dinosaur excavations and bioluminescent cabbage come together on a single page. African-American experience provides just one strand of what Moss calls her Limited Fork Poetics, her way of including everything: modes of inquiry proper to geology, biology, geography, physiology, theology and blasphemy all get extended hearings. Her title stands for the slippery nourishment of figurative language itself: "Peanut butter is a tributary of the Butter Nile fanning out." The long central poem "Deirdre: A Search Engine" includes contrapuntal moments of flat grief, of welcome understatement: "we say she's up there, but we go to the cemetery"; "without her being there, nothing is the way she would have wanted it." This anchor piece gives heft and clarity to what might otherwise feel overwhelming, establishing Moss as a creator with an unmistakable mind. (Oct.)