We Play a Game

In Doan’s quiet, careful debut, winner of the 2017 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, commonplace instances of love and prayer proliferate amid the pains of grief, abuse, and cultural dislocation. Doan is well-attuned to what makes these interactions simultaneously strange and poignant, and much of the pleasure of these poems derives from his control of image and scale. For example, Doan frames dating as “scheduled/ regular meetings to look at one another,” and he writes of a drunk, disconsolate friend, “You were sobbing louder than ever. When you came to, you drank half a big big water, brushed your teeth, but didn’t wash your face.” In one of the collection’s strongest poems, “Love Trinkets,” a history of various lovers—male and female, monogamous and polyamorous—becomes the occasion for meditations on desire, masculinity, vanity, and more: “I tried to take a selfie of us once but goofed the whole thing.// ‘Hold the river closer, Narcissus,’/ she told me. ‘Hold the river closer.’ ” Doan also writes about death and religion with admirable directness: “I should write as I pray./ Or I should stop writing.” Refreshingly unshowy, Doan’s collection is not an obvious choice for a big prize, but it reveals itself to be a deserving one. (Apr.)