Staying Alive

This fourth collection from Sims (My God Is This a Man), a meditation on the scope of life, culls from apocalyptic literature to write about anxiety and crisis. The book is as physically slight as some of the poems appear to be, but that apparent insubstantiality creates a beautiful tension with the depth of this work. Many of the poems are as stimulating visually as they are verbally. On a page of warning, the phrase "The air full of sound" spreads wide across a page, its repetitions framing the terrifying center text: "AN/ EVACUATION/ IS/ A/ TERRIBLE/ THING." The reader can hear these poems happening, a sonic acuity that recalls Lyn Hejinian or even Gertrude Stein. The poems are untitled, lightly punctuated, and deeply disorienting. As experiential as the poems are, Sims grounds the work with pointed epigraphs on the nature of time and transformation, and finishes the book with an extended essay on the apocalypse in which she writes that it is not the destruction of the world as humans know it that matters, but rather "what the humans do in response to these driving anxieties." Rarely does one come across a collection this inventive, or a poet who so capably teaches her reader how to understand that inventiveness. (Mar.)