Well Then There Now

Spahr's fifth book of imaginative writing (both poems and prose) should be a blockbuster, a lasting disturbance; a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority; it is also the best, and perhaps the most widely accessible, thing that Spahr has done. Most of its sentences, lines, paragraphs and photographs stem from her years in Hawai'i, where she investigated the island's fragile ecologies and its fraught politics, including (in her view) decades of misunderstanding by invasive outsiders. An initial salvo of unrhymed sonnets invites us to place her emotions about the islands in more than just personal frames: "Things are larger than the personal way of telling," they explain, "For we are located with some and not with others for this is intimate." There follow two essays about two sites, Dole Street and "2199 Kalia Road in Waikiki." Extinctions, Hawai'ian and worldwide, haunt other prose poems, where "the systems of human governments and corporations felt so large and unchangeable and so distant" that it was hard to know what to do. Last, and perhaps best of all, a verse essay about Spahr's hometown, Cillicothe, Ohio, considers her own class position, her own harsh origins, and her grown-up writing life, "attempting to grow some other eyes." (July)