Ominous Music Intensifying

The candid fourth collection from Teague (Or What We’ll Call Desire) depicts memories of her Arkansas childhood. The title, inspired by a caption from a movie Teague watched during the pandemic, captures the speaker’s restlessness. Yeats’s apocalyptic Rough Beast from his poem “The Second Coming” makes multiple appearances, taking a painting class and listening “to a PSA from Lake America.” As Teague takes on gun violence, pollution, greed, and Mitch McConnell, she writes, “We all go swimming in moonlight/ that’s really a cow pond: that clay-suck-and-cow-shit squelching the slits/ between our toes like we’re a creature evolving from webbed feet/ or back again; duckweed gritty on our t-shirts because the August heat/ of our own fears has become unbearable.” She invokes her homeland in all its tacky glory and sordid history, from carnival rides to the Klan: “Hands in the air/ for the Bald Knobbers with their black-horned masks and cutout/ eye holes, who set the fire, who no one mentioned, helped set/ the Ozarks on the tracks of whiteness.” The dense and lengthy poem “Mean High Water: An American Gyre” blends Annie Edson Taylor’s Niagara Falls barrel plunge (“I/ hoped, she said, to aid myself financially”) with glimmers of other near drownings, including the speaker’s divorce. With urgency and skill, Teague captures the dangers and disillusionment of contemporary America. (Oct.)