The Late Show

Trinidad's 13th collection is a cinematic recuperation of the more and less significant people, places, encounters and objects that compose the movie of a life. In these loquacious, unfettered and sometimes playful poems, Trinidad painstakingly recalls divas, artists, friends, lovers and his mother. In looking back, the poet couches his memories in pop culture and formal experimentation: his “Nature Poem” is a clever arrangement of movie titles (“How a Tree Grows in Brooklyn/ Autumn Leaves// Lost Horizon/ Gone with the Wind”), and “Gloss of the Past” is an indulgent prose catalogue of pink lip gloss names (“Fluffy Moth Pink... Turn Pale Pink”). In rambling, accumulative elegies in long lines or prose, a “jar of Topaze cream (a yellow jewel embedded in the lid)” is one of many relentlessly remembered details that accrue toward simple, moving admissions, such as: “I miss my mother.” The long closing piece, “A Poem Under the Influence,” is a confessional and discursive look at the past by an obsessively collecting and recollecting mind that admits: “Better to look pinkly through a glass at the tarnished past,/ count my blessings (on both hands), and call it a day. But I have to ask: why...” (Sept.)