Saint Friend

Composed of 10 long and medium-length poems, this second collection from Adamshick, who won the 2010 Walt Whitman Award for Curses and Wishes, is a refreshing addition to both the McSweeney's Poetry Series and contemporary poetry at large. Adamshick displays a startling breadth of emotion and intellectual curiosity, desperate humor, and a delicate tenderness amidst existential and spiritual crisis. "They keep paging Kenneth Koch at the airport," he opens, "Someone should let the announcer know/ he is dead, that there is no city he can go to,/ that no one is expecting him." Throughout, Adamshick practices a kind of double-dance, flitting across subjects, states, and registers, yet consistently striking heartstring after heartstring: "The overwhelming sadness in seeing// yourself as human, limited/ to one term, is fleeting." Through a mix of persona poems (inhabiting Amelia Earhart and various first-name friends), direct addresses, and meditations, Adamshick reveals a sense not of radical, but of obvious, necessary empathy that culminates in the veneration of the other, a sainthood of friends: "To see that child's mouth/ cover her nipple/ was to see much of my life/ fall away it was to see snow/ before it falls/ to see mineral/ lace its way through rock." (Oct.)