A Timeshare

Full of ideas, almost giddily aloft on the swells of long sentences, and replete with carefully counterintuitive moments of beauty, Ross’s much-awaited debut poses a frequently thrilling (and only occasionally insurmountable) challenge to older generations’ tastes. Ross sees sometimes-dramatic, sometimes-anodyne sites—such as a bland bedroom, the contours of a war memorial, and an Arctic shore—with an eye that fills in pixelated details, “retaining little/ nicks the wind chiseled, kelp lashes/ and shade, distant specks of fish/ the size of flies, foam-laced/ concentric halos.” But she also explores the depths and the crevasses of inner space: “Is there no method// to flush out the self that wants/ the others gone? Misgivings drowned, all/ attention held there in the room where time// is wide.” Ross’s sentences, and sometimes her poems, go on for longer than most young poets can manage: her ambitions and digressions may suggest her onetime teacher Jorie Graham, though a deeper influence is Marianne Moore, whose complex sentence patterns, doubling back, and confounding opponents, Ross (now a Stegner Fellow at Stanford) picks up. And Ross uses those modernist patterns to describe the unsettled lives, the unanswered aches, of her own precarious generation (Ross is in her late 20s), outlining with every implication “some reach/ in the head the sense is// insufficient to relay.” (Nov.)