Zarin’s fine-tuned seventh collection (after Orbit) visits and revisits familiar themes of love and loss, regret and acceptance, childhood and motherhood. The poems are laced with references to Greek mythology, sketches of Italian life, the natural world (in particular, the seashore), and nursery rhymes. The collection includes sonnets, sequences, and several multipart poems. Little escapes Zarin’s eye; in “Looking for the Great Horned Owl in Truro Woods,” the speaker asks, “And then, what was more mysterious/ than us, crashing through the woods// to see a sound?” Baby cormorants in a painting are described as “small, feckless/ thunderclouds painted by a dabbler who/ wants to get everything in.” Zarin seems to search for self-knowledge when she urges, “Let my demons rage so I know who they are” (“The Muse of History”). “Ruby at Auction” closes with an image of “The largest ruby/ ever auctioned, outlasting love or sentiment.” Perhaps the key to Zarin’s work can be found in one of the collection’s newest poems, “Farewell”: “I filled the house/ with light, because it could not find/ me as the darkness could.” This skillful volume finds both light and darkness in abundance. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 12/13/2024 | Details & Permalink

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.

Reviewed on 12/13/2024 | Details & Permalink

Weise displays a knack for blending personal anecdote with cultural critique in her energetic latest (after Cyborg Detective). The “cyborg”—and technology’s relationship to humanity—remains a motif throughout. A letter to the reader explains the poet’s project: “I’ve been stuck in ye ole nondisabled forms. So I’m inventing new ones. The poems live double lives: on the page and off the page.” Accessibility is a major concern, and Weise writes about its stakes with originality and spirit: “for some poems, I put my access first. I call this move, centering the disabled writer’s access before all others, cygo.ergo.nomix, with the dots in it so you know how to say.” The opening poem, “A Very Kind Note to Some Poets,” asks, “What are you keeping out of your poems? And why?” The highly contemporary allusions and references include Submittable, Facebook, and hashtags (the poem “Tag, You’re It” is an arranged list of hashtags around the book’s central considerations: “#AbleismExists/ #NotUsExactlyBut/ #AccessIsLove”). Standout entries include “DMS With Corbett O’Toole,” which blends humor and pathos to remarkable effect: “I’m lost and all my goods/ are perishable. Help!” The result is a wry and inventive collection. (Sept.)

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Wild, pastoral, and deeply patient, Yoon’s beautiful third collection (after A Cruelty Special to Our Species) explores inherited family tales, the violence of love, and the complexities of the self’s becoming (“I want my life/ to be a poem”). Throughout, Yoon evokes the often paralyzing duality of desire: “when I say we are beasts,/ is that a metaphor?” (“What Carries Us”). Inviting and spacious, these pages accomplish as much in their silences as they do in their words. Yoon’s stanzas are often brief, serene, and lyrical, less preoccupied with holding the reader’s attention than inviting reflection. The voices here are fraught and familiar, particular and universal: “I want nothing to change, then wait for my life to change” (“Gray Areas”). Her speakers are unabashed and yearning, bearing witness to the beast in each person, as well as to the lifelong task of self-reckoning: “You find me as the creature that I am,/ staring up at you” (“Next Lives”). These are skillful, meditative poems. (Oct.)

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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.)

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Weaving themes of loss, memory, and transformation, Holland-Batt (Fishing for Lightning) stuns in this powerful volume that draws from her previous collections. In “Pocket Mirror,” the hypnotic rhythm and sharp diction evoke an intensity reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s work: “I stare, I stare—/ I am cut from clear air/ brutal and planetary.” Throughout, the natural world—urban or wild—gives voice to internal reckonings. Regret is conveyed through visceral imagery in “The Invention of Ether”: “Still I cling to the sting/ like the slobbering octopus/ I failed to rescue/ from boyish torturers/ on a Sicilian beach.” Likewise, in “Shore Acres,” the struggles of love and loss are expressed with stark finality: “Gathering the kind of force required/ to stop loving, as only a stone can.” In “The Art of Disappearing,” the poet captures the ache and paradox of impermanence: “When you vanish, you’re only somewhere else, but I’m still here.” In “The Sewing Room” and “A Good Marriage,” ordinary moments are transformed into meditations on legacy, individuality, and human connection. The hum of the sewing machine and the quiet rituals of shared lives become metaphors for the significant existential questions that permeate her work, “maps I would outgrow/ charted in painstaking tailor’s chalk.” It’s a dazzling achievement. (Nov.)

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Dante speaks, but does not sing, in this straightforward translation by Luzzi (Botticelli’s Secret) of the medieval Italian poet’s meditation on love. In 42 brief sections, the book describes the poet’s youthful love for Beatrice, whom he first sees when they are both nine years old. After that first sighting, “Love governed my soul, which surrendered to him entirely.” Nine years later, Dante sees Beatrice on the street and dreams, in one of the poem’s most striking images, of Love forcing Beatrice to eat the poet’s burning heart from Love’s hands. Interspersing poems (“And from her eyes as she moves them about,/ Come burning spirits filled with flames of love”) with prose commentary (“I lingered for many days in this state of wanting to write, but in fear of beginning”), Dante details the agony and ecstasy of his love and the aftermath of Beatrice’s untimely death. Luzzi’s approach prioritizes “idiomatic fluency in English,” and his translation is eminently readable, employing a vocabulary and syntax familiar to any reader of modern English. As a result, Dante’s lines lose their luster at times: “If now I wish to vent my pain,/ Which brings me close to death’s own door,/ I must express my inner woe.” Still, this makes for an accessible and welcome introduction to Dante’s masterpiece. (Dec.)

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Nienow’s introspective sophomore collection (after House of Water) explores emptiness, desire, and the search for meaning. The book’s epigraph is from Nobel winner José Saramago: “Inside us there is something [with] no name, that something is what we are.” Fittingly, these poems oscillate between self-reckoning and a yearning for absolution, with nature and domesticity serving as recurring motifs, grounding the inner and outer worlds. “Daily Log #104” (“Drunk again. One tall bottle of that monk brew Golden/ Monkey and a sixer of Rainier that went down like water./ Lights off in the shop, hoping no one comes to the door”) and “Five Years Now” (“to that man almost gone/ from every world I’ve known”) strive toward redemption. Other poems are full of joyful lyricism, such as “I Kiss the Ground where We Lay”: “I curse the reckless yes/ in long June grass/ where we... let lips/ & tongues undo years.” Fleeting moments abound, as in “Alternate Endings,” in which the sun sings into a “glaze on the hill almost/ beautiful before we knew/ our house was on fire,” or “An Echo for the Archives”: “I have found happiness to be/ the most elusive of all states.” Unflinching and tender, this volume affirms Nienow’s distinctive poetic gifts. (Jan.)

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In Zoccola’s exceptional debut, The Iliad’s Helen of Troy is reimagined as a wistful Tennessee housewife, dissatisfied with her marriage and wasted potential and reliving the glory days of her youth. If the premise sounds contrived, the execution delivers something unexpectedly magical. Helen’s life is far from stereotypically bereft, as evidenced in the hilariously histrionic “helen of troy runs to piggly wiggly”: “the pig is the place where all desire/ is consummated, each want made fat, made starch, made bone-in-flesh... sing, muse, of the manager’s special, two-for-one on yogurt cups,/ little debbies leaping for the cart.” The narrative through line involves Helen having an affair but ultimately returning to her husband (whom she refers to throughout as “the big cheese”) and daughter. She speaks in the aftermath of the affair of wanting more for her child than she has had: “gods of birds// who speak in human voices, i do not want to watch/ her walk through a life of small mercies and small choices./ I want each tooth spit up clean and delivered to her palm/ to plant as she chooses.” Zoccola provides a winning combination of humor and enough pathos to make Homer proud. Accessible yet deep, this will be adored by seasoned poetry fans and casual readers alike. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/13/2024 | Details & Permalink

The exemplary 12th collection from Equi (The Intangibles) is full of virtuosic wit as the poet takes aim at America’s capitalist lust, oppression of human rights, and reliance on technology, as well as the distraction, isolation, ambivalence, and hunger for instant gratification these produce. She imagines that “hell is when you have to keep going/ from screen to frozen screen,” divulges that “the word ‘chicken’/ becomes a mantra.// Burgers appear/ like bloody daggers in Macbeth,” and suggests that society should welcome aging and “indulge in/ subversive acts of dawdling,//... cultivate the corpse flower,/ listen to it like a radio in a small room// quietly playing its hypnotic/ melodic overture of decomposition.” Staccato enjambment, droll puns, rollicking portmanteaus, and zingy alliteration scintillate throughout. With heady sensory language and wordplay, she sobers the reader with somber apparitions: “Each/ carries/ their/ parcels/ of/ sadness// through the/ twilight/ village// under/ the/ illusion/ they’re/ alone.” These endlessly quotable, epigrammatic poems articulate the human experience with the ethereality of a harp and the coy trill of a cymbal. Equi’s linguistic dexterity and innovation are nonpareil. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/13/2024 | Details & Permalink