Anon

In her sensuous second collection, Terazawa (Winter Phoenix) addresses a series of love poems to the adverb anon across four lyrical sections that meditate on themes of romance, colonialism, violence, and loss. The opening poem, “Stay,” begins: “For the muse could not/ light another city// with her eyes, you spoke/ anon, oil black like mine,// and whoever crossed/ that cobbler’s// bridge in Ljubljana/ would also speak of roots.” “Walk with me, anon,” she writes, taking this unnamed addressee to a garden “[o]vergrown with books” through “each decade of grief.” These deeply felt poems are filled with images of gibbons, rivers, and roses. Indeed, the speaker writes, “We could have dreamed of roses.” With haunting imagery, Terazawa describes a world where one’s “present tense arrived misshapen” in settings ravaged by war or climate change. “Kids are dying,// in your country and my country, too,” she proclaims. These poems tackle the challenges and atrocities of the present with an eye to the past and an insistence on beauty. Terazawa’s lush imagination gorgeously renders the interconnectedness of a difficult world. (Feb.)