Pleasure Principle

Cravens opens her searching debut with a litany of loose anapests and delicious slant rhymes on the theme of pleasure: “Not the pleasure of lovers but the pleasure of letters,/ a pleasure like weather, delayed and prepared for,/ not the pleasure of lessons but the pleasure of errors.” The book’s questionable delights—terrors, daughters, unanswered letters—are revisited in the sparser poems that follow, which offer cryptic vignettes of sexual explorations and familial dysfunction that move through Brooklyn, rural landscapes, and Lebanon (briefly) before arriving in California: “after the party, Ellen choked me against the refrigerator./ It was very quiet. Other students filtered into the snow./ Can there be a story where a character wants nothing?/ Even in happiness I did not find much satisfaction.” Another poem recalls, “Last night I let a stranger hit me in the face./ She was a therapist. After, we discussed real estate.” “Jacob Riis Beach” develops into an elegantly stark recollection of a building and a relationship: “Damp brick walls, cracked windows./ Then I remember its absence. In the end,/ there is only exposure: the wind-blown recess/ where a building stood.” Though occasionally uneven, particularly in its more fragmentary poems, this collection successfully delivers the eros and disorder of young adult life. (June)