Heart First into the Forest

Gnall's debut takes such delight in the musicality of language that at times it is enough to simply hear her lines: "a stone, a callow Jonah,/ now solemn as if going to school//...sees each stitch in the line/ from scripture, the stomach now// skeins of skin." In poems populated with damsels, lace-keepers, and "beastly embezzlers," Gnall threads the lyric through the fantastic, creating a collection that is as boisterous and stark as it is macabre. Her poems are at their most alluring when Gnall doesn't flinch from showing us the disturbing potential of metaphor—as in "The Insecticide in Him," where a brother "clacks his gum, his tongue a pink balloon"—and when she allows her lines to rupture in the handful of dissociative poems peppered throughout the book. Though her heavy use of metaphor often does more to constrict an image than delve its complexities ("drag our insides like lakes for evidence of infection"), it also accounts for some of Gnall's most striking lines: the moon is "a fat, white mosquito bite" and Frank O'Hara, to whom Gnall confides in her bewilderment, is "confident as a continent// ...half man and half morale." (May)