]Exclosures[

What possibilities can poetics make in a world structured by logics that contain or constrain the human spirit? Abendroth’s debut charts some “improbable” options in a text that manages to sustain its beauty while directly facing this indifference. Hers is a world where a daughter’s “cagey lack of fidelity before all the boundaries/ that she’s been given is the best smidgen of radical hope/ we’ve got to our lot.” These boundaries are the boundaries of such broad-reaching powers as the prison-industrial complex and state, yet it becomes possible to weaken them with language, as even in placing words together: “There’s no combination we can forge that isn’t mutually contagious.” The poems, with their rich internal rhymes, read like sly escapes from Abendroth’s own structural play—brackets, multiple choice lists, and quoted text that make the book a hybrid affair. That she comes close to using her lyric powers to upset those boundaries makes our own personal projects of liberation seem livened again. She ends with an extended poetic statement in essay form, and though it is insightful, its real success is pointing readers back into the poems proper. Abendroth’s final poem concludes, “We went to the water as if it were an usher/ Let us make it one/ Let us gushing”—we should take heed and dive in. (May)