Little Stranger

Early in this third collection, Olstein (Lost Alphabet) announces: “I am hopeful, and the hopeful seek/ the hopeless, a level always/ in need of rising.” This uncertain balance between hope and hopelessness, fear and fascination, breaks the calm surface of her poems. The book is broken into six sections with a breathing space partway through in the form of a poem constructed of letters to “Sir,” then “Sire” then “Siren.” One of Olstein’s longer pieces, “I Saw a Brand New Look,” softly urges us “to take occasionally/ a bird’s-eye view, to see ourselves moving as if on sped-up film/ like ants through the colonies of their very long short-lives.” The poems are detached, numb at times, and often revert to instructional language to describe situations when instruction is completely ineffective. Olstein uses this inflection as a thin shield against life’s urgency and bewildering circumstance: “On a steamer it’s always/ somebody’s job to steer.” Yet fear peeks through the facade when she writes from the point of view of a rabbit with “wise eyes”: “because prey runs, we learn not to run,/ not to turn our backs or look away/ from the predator we dread and long/ again to see because what we dread most/ is it seeing us without being seen,/ which is almost always the way.” (May)