Outside the Joy

Awad’s deeply felt sophomore collection (after Set to Music a Wildfire) reverberates with lines as hard and true as rock: “The lie is that I survived because parts of me didn’t.” She shifts and complicates the sentiment, adding, “we tell the version of the story/ that lets us live with ourselves.” Divided into three parts, the collection opens with a section titled “The Whole Red World” that centers on her mother, a painter: “I want to fill my pockets/ with the color my mother made, to break the red/ mountain and eat its red pulp, to pin its red wings/ to my back and walk the red desert of my heart/ that learned from my mother how to live.” One of the most heartrending entries abandons punctuation and flows out in a long, breathless column, recalling her grandmother’s death: “my father watched his brother carry/ your body from his phone’s small/ screen that’s what happens when/ you die in a pandemic.” These poems mourn with ferocity and clarity, animals and objects rearing up like a “weep of wolves,/ a drought of bullets, the claws of a catalpa, a mother’s unworry,/ a wilderness of blood.” It is the hurt—and Awad’s bravery in facing it—that lends these poems their remarkable power and vividness. (Sept.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the relative whose death is recalled in one of the collection’s entries. It also misstated the title of the author’s previous book.