Intimacy

The poems in this second collection from Imbriglio (Parts of the Mass), which won the 2013 Colorado Prize for Poetry, are expansive and elliptical: “the wave’s existence does not depend on its being experienced by a conscious subject.” The engine of these poems, like the wave, seems to have existed long before their encounter with a reader, and will continue long after, resulting in the reader’s feeling of having stumbled into an ongoing consideration of the workings of a mind. Imbriglio’s long-lined, multipart poems, the titles of which all share the word “intimacy,” fuse expository texts with lyric imagery. This collection is neither narrative nor confessional, though its title may mislead readers; Imbriglio writes, “All together my efforts to whip up the ocean, like the ocean, would be no page-turners.” Rather, Imbriglio turns to scientific and sociological models to understand the mind, lifting chunks of language from texts on selective mutism, capitalism, free will, and the Turing test. She finds, in the mutable language of these texts, answer after answer to her recurring question, “What local knowledge would make my flotsam and jetsam patterns visible.” And, in the unfolding of these poems Imbriglio demonstrates that “quantifiable faraway arms can be a conduit to really touch you.” “Like it or not, reader,” one poem asserts, “you and I have been coupling.” (Jan.)