Except by Nature

""Like a marriage. Like a nation. Like a haunting, this story tells me."" In lithe, muscular language, Alcosser's best poems inflect the pastoral with the political. The Atchafalaya swamp of Louisiana, the family autobody shop in the Midwest of her youth and the Bitterroot range of Montana where she now lives--each serve in turn as sites for multifaceted poems of place: ""If you were born to a gooey/ bayou, two faithless fathers,/ a silent mother, sleazy clouds/ overhead for pillows,// you'd celebrate too."" This second full-length collection, chosen by Eamon Grennan for the National Poetry Series, comes more than a decade after Alcosser's first, and moves among forms as well as locales: there are journalistic prose poems like ""A Warrior's Tale,"" (which unflinchingly approaches extreme violence against women), and free-verse lyrics that dream after ecstatic encounters (""In Case of Rapture This Taxi Will Explode""). Throughout, the poet marvels at the grandeur of landscapes--and the scratchings out of family and friends within them. Some of the poems veer precariously close to clich --several set in Louisiana stop just short of voodoo and a funeral parade--but the blunt carnality of others (""his bolt of news unfurling, my face flushed red/ and red again by the hot inquiring tongues"") gives them a welcome urgency. (June)