What Is Amazing

For her third full-length collection, Christle expands her formal palette while retaining the inquisitiveness and playfulness that have made her poems so intoxicating to her growing number of fans. The tight lineation and white-space experiments of her previous work remain, but here she uses shorter lines in poems that mix a sense of childlike naïveté with grown-up investigations of the troubles of romantic entanglement as well as more ephemeral topics and unfamiliar mental spaces: “and your body is a long silk bag/ full of lightweight batteries/ arranged on the floor.” Yet Christle threads existential darkness and black humor throughout these poems, as in the title piece in which “That man thinks he is a man/ but he is a candle.// Who will tell him?/ He will be destroyed// and his wife will be on fire./ Life is tough for that man especially.” Hip and almost self-consciously contemporary, but also alive to the often overwhelming excitements of the Internet age, Christle’s new poems will beckon more readers her way. (Feb.)