Songs from a Mountain

If an oracle’s pronouncements were pitched into the cacophony of modern life and then retuned as scrambled wisdom coalesced into poems, what might result is this third collection from Nadelberg (Bright Brave Phenomena), a wild, careening, conceptually wily (yet somehow ruly) book that refuses to keep its feet on the ground. “Let me go again into the/ epileptic air that will render a body capable or/ less dumb to the sun signaling its framed song,” she writes early on, before noting “how the act/ of putting your shoes on is a set of expectations.” Such incisive moments stand out against the collection’s ruling chaos, especially in the longer poems (“I Steal Care 4 U,” “Mont America,” “Rad Silence Crystal Weapon Wave Mont”). It is there that Nadelberg most consistently hits her stride in a tumbling, almost overwhelming medley of various sources, even as many of the shorter poems in the collection offer elegance (“nothing could/ be clearer and everything was”) and sly riffing off their titles (for instance, in “Big Data”: “like porn I wonder if I’m/ being impossible in a new/ way. People have tickets/ for the theater. Push the/ plant into the sun.”). Through the de- and recontextualization of what was first familiar and is now strange, Nadelberg establishes herself as an exemplar of early 21st-century artistic practice. (May)