You Good Thing

Opening with a sketched map and quote—“by the longest possible route”—from Fernando Pessoa, Wier’s 11th collection delights in its turnings and tangents, line to line, poem to poem. These loose sonnets—in some respects traditional lyrics addressing a illusive Other—echo Pessoa’s experiments with how the self writes and is written. “For the sake of/ Argument,” Wier writes in the first poem, “let’s say I’m a crime and you’re a clue and someone,/ Else, we don’t know who, is the detective,” and while the poems do play and role-play, their willingness to do so is grounded in grief: “I feel like/ Someone who’s been practicing poorly a system of rituals/ Banished and bled of their meaning,” she writes. “No one if not you/ Will be able to stop me.” Wier sets her poems amidst shifting landscapes in which the reader can only “catch a glimpse of the story once the bridge has collapsed.” It’s a sometimes surreal search for truth in the face of meaninglessness, “Tantamount to a ticker tape parade on the streets of/ A stunned city,” and there is much to marvel at on the way. (Apr.)