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Jill Magi. Ugly Duckling (SPD, dist.), $17 trade paper (136p) ISBN 978-1-933254-87-6

Visual and architectural memorials, with other questions of space and urban surroundings, provoke the brief lines and terse prose poems in this book-length sequence, sure to raise—if never to answer—questions about how memory and the built environment can interact. Magi (Threads), also a visual artist, dedicates the volume to her home city, New York, and it surely remains conscious of 9/11, but its scope takes it far afield: to Hiroshima, to “the Colonial Williamsburg Escaped Slave Program, begun in 2000,” to Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, and to unbuilt monuments: “Do not weep for this missing cultural heritage site. Do not weep for this missing. Insert possible titles here.” Accompanied by photographs and prefatory, italicized poems in couplets, Magi’s prose units can feel like captions for as-yet-nonexistent installations, or like prompts to see history with new eyes. She does not set out to describe what she sees, but to react, in the condensed, suggestive language of poems: “Which comfort do you seek,” she asks, “wringing out the sorrow previously held in order to make way for the new?/ How much violence is an echo?” (Dec.)