Boxed Juice

Near the end of this exuberant sophomore collection, Chapman (Delinquent Palaces) offers herself a divine pardon: “Thus the Lord showed me both ways,/ the austere and the hospitable, are good.” Indeed, these poems move between rival modes and moods, by turns word-drunk (“chucking empties in the boondocks,/ from which fireflies still drowse into the grasp”) and puritanical (“There is a spirit in me that admits no weakness/ When it sings, the rest of me despairs”). Deepening the book’s divides, an extended memoir (written in the third person) bridges two sequences of lyric poems, covering the treatment of her husband’s cancer, the poet’s experience of IVF, and the birth of twins. At times, the prose delivers flat facts (“When the girls were eight months old, her husband was admitted to the 15th floor with an infernal swelling under his chin, ten out of ten on the pain scale”); elsewhere, it reaches for imagery (“The white sky, blank as blotter paper, absorbed bare branches like aneurysms of ink”). For the most part, though, the book’s shifts of genre, tone, and diction successfully cohere. The result is a fitting testament to Chapman’s generous imagination. (Oct.)