And the Girls Worried Terribly

Devota's rhapsodic, much-anticipated debut packs so much tension, unsettling exuberance, and rigor into its lines that each poem feels ready to burst off the page. Whether "facing the self that cannot be identified" or "wearing heavy metals as two-bit cannibals emerge," Devota retains a white-hot pitch where anger, jubilee, disgust, hilarity, and dismay smolder together in the same stanzas. Pursued by an unnamed dread%E2%80%94and intensified by mid-line enjambments that both accelerate and give them pause%E2%80%94Devota's poems are also startlingly optimistic in their willingness to relinquish control of the poem to the lines themselves: "From a pile of rubble," she writes, "grass grows water streams through/ people stay buried, light cannot/ be unrecognizable/ we think/ we forget it/ actually is, literally, other worldly." The self in conflict with itself is Devota's battleground, where we remain "the body in the bag/ and the dilemma of dragging it"; just as we attempt to get closer to ourselves through others, we find that "you are my life you ruined." The danger of this double bind is beautifully addressed in the book's final poem, where Devota warns us that if we give away the body and relinquish the self, "it will/ turn out you/ miss having a place to visit." (Dec.)