Radio Crackling, Radio Gone

The poems in Olstein's Hayden Carruth Award–winning debut inhabit haunted interiors where "[g]arage doors open and close of their own volition," and landscapes where "everything blooms coldly" and "the sun shines through like a moon." Olstein constructs an almost impersonal, dreamlike atmosphere tinged with malaise, inertia and a sense that anything could happen but very little does. She is drawn to fluidity (references to water abound) and transitional states (from sleep to waking, from day to night); she is devoted to paradox, wonder and uncertainty. Such interests are nothing if not lyrical commonplaces, but Olstein's doggedness and focus lend them, here and there, a fresh vitality: "We huddle for warmth as if in a cave made of snow." The poems sometimes threaten to dissolve into a cloud of their own devising ("I'd never seen it so clear,// so gusty, so overcast, so clear, so calm"), but Olstein reins in her haziness with studiously regulated line lengths and stanza shapes. She is at her best—and certainly most distinctive—punctuating the book's cultivated vagueness with a blast of vivid, arresting detail: "April's first bee stumbles newly minted from its vault." (Nov.)