Bliss to Fill

""I soak underwear with my head out to dry,// I am happy to be organized with my problems,/ keeping them simple and deft for an unremarkable bathtub oratory."" An ebullient, South Asian-American identity is put through the emotional wringers of lost love, first generationality, and New York City in this debut-and emerges triumphant. The book takes its title and one of two epigraphs from Dickinson (""Our blank is bliss to fill""), and is suffused with a Dickinson-like archaic diction that lends ""Prageeta,"" as she appears in the third person, an historical aureole: ""Arguments/ do arouse this poem which oscillates in the same, trying space as arguments./ How do we rise to a spiritual position? Prageeta asks. Wanting to again, reading/ Hegel, she asks the book to fly to him."" The book is divided into two chapbook-length sections. The first, ""Dear _____,"" includes letters to a lover-like ""Dearest echo,"" and to disheartened comsumers of Prageeta's poems; contemplates the arranged marriage of the poet's parents; and exhorts a ""Politician Bird"" ""Do continue to free the clouds from the firm, plastic, earth."" The second, ""The Other Possibility,"" considers lifestyles like those of the multi-part ""All-Purpose Rockstar"" (where a poet taunts fans, and deploys ""The song designed for situational/ dumbness""); of a bitter, bizarre ""Girl Vendor"" (""my spacecraft is more project-/ oriented than your spacecraft""); of ""The Assassins""; and even a ""Suburban Address."" At once playful, ironic and affecting, this debut suggests that Sharma will ""roll onward, to deviate, to leeward-I did have thrills/ or happily ate, or vigor caught me."" (Feb.)