Tenuous Chapel

Tuckey has expanded her evocative chapbook, Rope as Witness, into this collection, chosen by Charles Simic. It's a precise balance of the personal and political, the urgent and the observed, as beheld in Tuckey's cool gaze. Her poems "Lesson in Cuban Cooking" and "Re: Acquittal of Generals" echo, though more briefly, the dry, hypnotic tone of Carolyn Forch%C3%A9's famous prose poem "The Colonel:" "Wash the chicken in lime/ lift the embargo/ crush the ice and mint/ unify the ingredients." Tuckey's poems refrain from the use of periods or commas, often just passing a half-page in length. Instead, her pieces are punctuated by smart turns and unexpected imagery, making them particularly powerful in their brevity. The last section of the collection, "When the Giraffes Come," is more intimate, presenting vivid sketches of a sick friend or women kissing on a university campus: "a so long for now kiss/ and nothing breaks, no alarms are sounded/ no one is injured." The penultimate poem, "Pete Tells Me Things," moves deftly from "the tomato tree in his front yard," to "drinking red wine/ from plastic hospital cups" to the stunning ending image: "He tells me there was a shark once in Micronesia/ He slit its belly and watched it swim away/ without a heart." Through it all, Tuckey urges us to "hold the course, whatever it is." (Dec.)