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Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande Books, 2020). Adam O. Davis. A haunting is ruptural; an out-of-joint excess that interrupts the cover-up. We ghost a lot & get ghosted, mostly ourselves & history. Leave it to a poet to dive into all this: (the heart, best not look in there), but Davis looks & is appropriately careful; measured: his words tip-toe through their subjects, lifting objects & ideas up w the tip of a pencil; shining light into neglected corners, & as a result truly memorable phrases emerge. Some might find the poet’s level of rhetorical control irritating; his technical skills too clean, but when his reason slips, lines turn suddenly uncanny, revelatory, so that his mastery discloses itself as born out of inner necessity rather than pathological fear. Davis is a poet of delicate intensities; he might not be the crisis, but he gets so close to our crisis that the poems manage to feel deeply personal. Have I mentioned the photographs? Several are found throughout the book & presented in b/w, scenes orphaned by American capital (abandoned motel, etc) & while I longed to see the stubbornness of color in these lost places, their austerity pairs well w the poems in that they are both destined to be discovered (& remembered).

Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan, 2020). Peter Gizzi. This book is (so) touching & (so) difficult. There is something in his work I rarely feel in the work of others: an intense awareness of human loneliness. (No one ever shouts Look In! but I’ve heard Incoming!) Life is short, until love is gone & civil war is a planet, when being a subject, over & over again, starts to feel like a drag. Here, Gizzi sounds more harassed into art-making than seduced (although sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference) & under this duress, he still gets the word across, thrashing w elegance. Inside my little library, there’s a secret shelf where I put my special books, the ones that make the free fall feel more free than fall: Now It’s Dark is one of them.

Earth (The Song Cave, 2019). Hannah Brooks-Motl. Every poem makes a new reason for poetry: I, the, and, to, a, of, that, in, it, my, is, you, was, for, have, with, me, on, yet. The deeper we chill in Earth, the more savage her clarity; she obeys an anguish (of possibility) that makes me weep, especially when I’m outside. Is saying what we feel saying what we must? There’s intimacy (musical unbosoming) in every poem but the kind of intimacy that seems subject to laws outside itself, like spirit (or whatever). (Things loathe to speak to us but speak to us!) Autobiographical data (landscape; fam) phrase to a mood of philosophy & her images almost always hit. One day I’ll stop reading this book.

Like Bismuth When I Enter (Nightboat Books, 2020). Carlos Lara. Not Exit? Reading poetry is a clandestine side-entry into language (kinda, idk); a bizarre clearing for a we. Lara’s work—aggressively gorgeous; confident—possesses a syntax (& voice), that despite its brazen eccentricity, we associate w reason (function words), so while reading his primeval moods we are both spellbound & unpleasantly aware of the trace of logic. See this: you find yourself toggling between pure music & a craving to look under the hood: are the poems the result of trance procedures; perhaps séance? (Do I search “Carlos Lara interview?”) It’s a bold book to publish, especially during a pandemic; during political nightmare, as if to remind us that regardless of how clear a poem says Yes, it also says No.

sundaey (Propeller Books, 2020). Kirsten Ihns. Some poetry feels like a betrayal of language & then there’s poetry (Ihns’s, fi) that feels like it saves language. It’s !!! to read a poem & think: oh this poet adores words. So much trust goin on here folks, idkwtty. Impeccable timing too: right when she’s about to over-amplify one element (say, vertigo), she pivots instinctually into another element (fi, startling depth) & so on (lots of elements; demotic, etc.); pleasure accumulates; b-a-l-a-n-c-e felt. |Even the visual poems hit!| Thoughtful; visceral; savage, vulnerable; charming. (An amicable difficulty.) There is hope readers.

For the Ride (Penguin, 2020). Alice Notley. Cover art hasn’t achieved this level of cringe since Graywolf’s Deaf Republic. These words appear next to one another in the poet’s Preface (yes, there’s a preface): “another dimension.” Glyph rhymes w Matrix. (s_m_h.) Must we mean what we say? Must the mist of sweat sting our eyes? Inane global disaster poetry; silly visual poems; adult linguistic coloring book; chzE. Notley’s vision is low-budget glitch; English [Original]; French [CC]. Often hilarious (no, really); death by question mark (you’ll see). But heck, when offered immunity, take it.

The Problem of the Many (Wave Books, 2019). Timothy Donnelly. Facts as pure narcotic/relieve the crisis urge. Or: transforming the given feels magical (or empowering) (or both). Some will find it a tough sell/if they’re looking to be sold something. Sublime – I mean it - sublime synthesis of sentence & stanza; untypical thoughts respawn yet each time w a different emote wheel; poems_grave, humane, capacious. “Hymn to Life” imo iz the best long poem “in years.” A (w)hole world is! (The high/low binary dissolved, like, yesterday.) To read Donnelly is to know what it feels like to be a waterfall, but on a planet, sorta like ours (at 60 fps.) Orange heart emoji (x a gazillion).

The Crying Book (Catapult, 2019). Heather Christle. Which signals privilege more: crying all the time or having the time to write an entire book about crying? (Plenty folks don’t got spare rooms.) It’s the type of book a celebrity reads in public. But we’ve always needed the lucky to show us what we are, so who cares. Fun facts (research) braided w memoir: the franchise. Her prose, psychotically careful, goes down easy, like infinite scroll. (“Freshing the re-.”) What’s the difference between a sob story & a good cry? The symbolic.

A Princess Magic Presto Spell (Flood Editions, 2019). Lisa Jarnot. We do things, generally have people around, simple. Relocating into another’s childhood though: #TOTDY. This book year after year becomes a reliquary. Words play well with others, but since they’re so osculant, the poet wisely gives them space to air out. (Quotidian-acid-on-parent-tongue emoji: fun, ridiculous, strange.) Only a monster would dislike this book?

Unsun (Coach House Books, 2019). Andrew Zawacki. Not a guilty pleasure. (Candle fragrance: Autumn Professor.) The poet is a thaumaturge of language. A daughter is uploaded to human things up. (Kinetic flexatone camera.) Anxiety of influencers: the remix. Sonnets: astonishing. E=A=R=T=H.

Blue Flame (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2019). Emily Pettit. Few poets know how to train death to pirouette. That her. Her that. But it comes at a cost: saying no to what is is saying yes to the no that is. At least there’s music, which this poet got. Answers sound like questions; spirit. Sometimes, like, the poems pretend to wince, but they’re really transpiring; [furniture clatters].

A New Silence (Shearsman Books, 2019). Joseph Massey. Anchorite décor, dead leaf motif, mud in lackadaisical light. Thought is the heart’s punishment for beating. Relief carvings; stabs of color. Noticing is self-soothing; seeing is acceptance. Sometimes the verbs are too strong, weakening precision. Not a capital offense. A poem “far off” thaws the frozen page.

Nightingalelessness (Flood Editions, 2018). Graham Foust. If suicide were pleasant, it might sound like this. His poetry is supernaturally welcoming, in a hostile way. Aging does that. Death is not patient or impatient. Same as this poet. They just write good poems.

Sightseer In This Killing City (Penguin, 2019). Eugene Gloria. Also: poet loves his a-of-b phrases. (Okeydokey.) The melted canon drips into these cosmopolitan poems, jazz too, & like, “real people.” The poet’s depth has ironically made the emotions a bit too polished; an exposed nerve saved as JPEG. The book is a train ride, telling (telling) (telling) “stories.”

Song of Songs (FSG, 2019). Sylvie Baumgartel. Because the poem is so visceral (endless fucking, et al.), it can be easily enjoyed, but to understand the poem viscerally would be self-incriminating. Devotion comes in many guises & here it comes & comes (all for this preposterous You); allegory lubricates every malnourished hole. The blocks of prose work well; aching pens to exhibit the lack of shame.

Spiritual Exercises (Penguin, 2019). Mark Yakich. Manic & contemplative; paranoid & charming. The creation of a personality begins in the line’s music. Or in God’s flamboyant silence? idk. Religious poets – who are always orphans – can be a bit tedious, a bit too alive, forever bewitched by the maze inside (being) amazed. Bonus: there’s concrete poems to be found, of true wonder. I’m serious.

Dunce (Wave Books, 2019). Mary Ruefle. An offbeat mind with a soul that weeps. Or likes the idea of weeping. And of being born, etc. Our lives are sublime because they’re so tiny, which is why they feel so big. Her poetry makes us wonder: is the trivial profound, or the profound trivial? She has an odd way of showing us we’ll be dead before we know.

Anagnorisis (Northwestern, 2018). Kyle Dargan. Very eager to communicate; the poet’s measured candidness is striking. The savagery of America was pestled into his soul before he was born. Clarity is unsettling here, recalling something vast, like thought. His voice? Intimate & citizen-anguished; fully dedicated.

Like (FSG, 2018). A. E. Stallings. Lines r like: um, stick around? (Plainspoken? Not quite.) Form uproots speech & there’s nothing we can do about it, but the poet proves the abstract self is real—it can be sort of thrilling, like being bludgeoned & then cared for. Affection for Greece, abundant: this poet has war paint in her heart.

The Gilded Auction Block (FSG, 2019). Shane McCrae. Every poem self-stims on tiny thwacks of disquiet. It keeps the bleakness odd, but matter-of-fact. Sorry, America, not today; all day; now. Without heaven, it’s history all the way down. Archival-cool; split-dreaming the page. Psycho-staccato; painful: most visionaries write poems / that are.    

Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). Alex Dimitrov. Inside a blasé attitude, death asks for a light. All are entitled to suffer, even postcard poets. Chat & yearning; the furnace collage of la-de-da. Poems that babble replicate the moods of a search party. Tedious, fer sher, but we find lines of delicate insight we can’t shake: we are what we remember.

Druthers (Flood Editions, 2018). Jennifer Moxley. Thought & the erotic rub shoulders at the funeral of grief. Even happiness gets into the act. Fact: this poet’s style is idiosyncratic! Spring is, like, everywhere, so yeah. These poems? You don’t have to feel embarrassed reading them, which feels vanguard; or the before before before.

The Crazy Bunch (Penguin, 2019). Willie Perdomo. Men no longer boys r sentimental. A street gala of camaraderie lifted into the heaven of text. This poet knows by heart every lyric to death; au tattooed on the neck. A poetry of fierce autobiography, who will have access to such a poetry except the poet & his crew? But that question misses the joy.

The Surveyors (Knopf, 2017). Mary Jo Salter. Aging is panoramic & irresistible, like peering through a keyhole. Here, form is the sound time makes, but poems still end. Clarity is terrifying, but this poet finds mourning kinda hilarious. Looking back is humiliating. Writing back is youthful. Most don’t have the nerve to do either, but she does.

Museum of the Americas (Penguin, 2019). J. Michael Martinez. Exhausting; durable project. Analytical poets r sometimes the most soulful bc they lack soul. There’s music here, but is there? History buffs r always elegiac, so the poet is himself a tragic figurine in the curio of history, half-unintentionally; a body. This book pairs well w paintings of tears.

Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). Natalie Shapero. Violently likable. Death claps along in each poem. Sometimes you have to cover your ears. Animals & plants & God-things wait in line inside the same memory. The poet functions, well, to malfunction. It's pleasing, the way dumping ice into grass is pleasing.

Late Empire (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). Lisa Olstein. For a second, you might be like: do I want to listen? But a second ain't nothing, so all the seconds after the first are YES. The intellect re-imagines emotion; translate: poems that don't make you cry, but beckon. Aphoristic; driven: the poet's deeply amused—rather than devastated—by perception.

Distant Mandate (FSG, 2017). Ange Mlinko. A literature gazing into literature. Myth-drenched; drugged by craquelure. The part of the wall a mirror hides is where words almost die. Or poems that ask which you enjoy: the flowers or the vase. This poet, whose poems are lathered in ruins, discovers intimacy in those things made in defiance.

Woods & Clouds Interchangeable (Wave, 2019). Michael Earl Craig. Curiously tedious. Surreal, in a Pioneer Valley way. It's hard to express how devastatingly boring these poems are, like life after the voltage of youth drops. This poet needs a change of address. (Or clearly not.) And yet there is one redeeming quality: an absence of frustration.

A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019). Ariana Reines. The poet isn't ashamed of being ashamed for being. Corporeal cosmopolitanism; lyric universe; humane—a poetry of sobbing. (The like is the malware of love.) Ambition never felt so intimate; this distant.

Waste (BlazeVOX, 2019). Emily Toder. Not quite detached, not quite vulnerable, the poet skillfully handles despair w levelheadedness; the poems are hungry w/o drooling, which gives them Magic. To give in is different than giving up. She knows how hideous/not hideous existing is, which isn't a waste.

Four Essays (Tammy, 2019). Marty Cain. To self-disclose like this, one has to be familiar w the limitations of shame. The book is sensible; small. It doesn't parade itself. It feels secretive, like reading in public. Confident, a little sloppy, but moving. It makes contact.

The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Jericho Brown. Excessively meaningful & self-infatuated, but not indulgent; no one loves us correctly, especially ourselves. Memory rhymes w history; family w mythology; body w philosophy. Formally on. Tender (or is it yearning)—w authority.