Rayfish

Hickman (This Is the Homeland) fluidly melds poetry and prose in a collection crafted with an essayist’s narrative certainty and a poet’s dreamlike images and nonlinear sense of time. Though many of the James Laughlin Award–winning collection’s poems find their starting points in art, they go beyond the ekphrastic, blending together the writer’s response to a given work as well as biographical details and interviews about the piece and its artist. The title poem blends the life of the painter Chaim Soutine with the film Jacob’s Ladder and quotes from a book on Egyptian Gnostics, but retains narrative control with reminders of the necessary relationship between artist and viewer: “He structures my seeing; he imparts vision. I pamper this slight ghost—I encourage it.” The collection also displays a substantial interest in process. In several poems, Hickman draws on her experience as a surgeon’s technician. Vivid bodies lie open like Soutine’s beef carcasses, the speaker drawing “inspiration from going in to repair flesh that isn’t damaged.” Hickman remarks: “Part of me would like to make work that’s minimal, well organized, clean, quiet, and comprehensible. But hands learn to do things. They have to learn to read.” True to her word, Hickman maintains a surgical precision through her work’s sinewy twists and turns. (Apr.)