Joy Ride

Cataloging the sorrows and wonders of native and foreign landscapes and family history, Slate’s latest (after The Great Wave) stitches together incisive vignettes with moments of clarity and humor. Slate considers the amorphous nature of stories and their presentation (“Within each story is a substance, saline and tidal, wearing down the/ shape of the telling”) as he contemplates childhood nostalgia, his family’s legacy of survival in WWII, and the attempt to preserve what one can of the narratives that construct identity. At the funeral of a friend, he describes grief: “there is a lost sound in this lamentation, not/ obliging anyone to respond. A sound spoken to no one but the thing that/ matches the poverty of my powers to move or speak.” Coming to terms with change versus history’s repetitions, he states: “The present used to be a turnstile from past to future,/ but now the moment is employed to say no that was what happened, this/ is what’s coming, millions of versions beyond grasp and control,/ deleted and rewritten.” Slate is cinematic and direct, creating a distinct and salving viewfinder of impressions, though transitions within poems occasionally feel stilted. Elegiac, quietly intimate, and droll, this collection is both sagacious and accessible. (Feb.)