The Next Country

The first half of this vivid debut reacts to the poet’s travels, mostly in Central and South America. One poem watches “Ziggy Marley at the Estadio Nacional”; another envisions a nation in which “When asked about hunger,/ the children replied with hunger.” Novey strikes a fine balance between hints and allusions to political history and generalized or allegorical locales, not proper nouns or place names but “leaping wells to the underworld”; she mixes prose poems with solidly crafted free verse, poems about particular sites with poems about travel itself, “from the Home Depot in Lima/ or in search of the Dalai Lama.” Novey (who is also a translator) fills the second half of her volume with equally well-made poems about American places, which follow the history of a family, perhaps her own. “They met at Hardy’s in a highway town,” one poem opens; another looks harder at the American isolation of the plains, where “After the last house,/ the land extends like a hand before the mouth of a horse.” Carolyn Forche selected Novey for a prestigious chapbook prize, and Novey’s poems will certainly inspire comparisons to Forche’s. But the wide range of this book attest that Novey has many unique gifts of her own. (Nov.)