In Darwin’s Room

Greger (By Herself) stitches together a work of nostalgic reflections, whimsical narratives, and odes to those who have filled her imagination. She is an old-fashioned poet with a modern eye, bewitching in her handling of the ordinary and without a trace of opacity. Greger envisions a variety of anthropomorphic perspectives. Adopting the role of a spider, she writes, “From the eye of a buttonhole// in a shirt abandoned on a chair,/ I watch your beloved sleep on the couch,/ mouth ajar.” While contemplating her stark, Catholic upbringing, Greger delivers one of her more humorous lines: “On Mother’s Day/ the priest poured fire and brimstone/ on spaghetti straps.” She also cinematically illustrates her disenchantment with the age of technology, noting how in an old theater “Cell phone screens constellated the dark/ with their empty light-years.” Of Greger’s various elegies, her most fanciful is dedicated to her English teacher: “Her virtuous hand—no, her red-nailed,/ vulturous claw—rattled the chalk.” In a collection chock-full of endearing literary references and lexical mastery, Greger manages to conjure an eternal present that reverberates with times past. (June)