Poetry Reviews

Pink Lady

Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)

by George Longenecker

 

Sentimental without being saccharine, Denise Duhamel’s Pink Lady takes us through her mother’s decline and death at a nursing home in Rhode Island. While the book is a poetic memoir of sorts, Duhamel uses her mastery of craft to draw in the outer world of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.

 

The book starts with “Prodigal Prayer,” in which the poet travels from Florida to be with her mother who is slowly declining in the same nursing home where she once worked as a nurse: “I drive her twenty-year-old Toyota to see her / in the Catholic nursing home where the priest reminds us / ‘this too shall pass.’” In “Last Picnic,” Duhamel and her sister take their mother out to a meal: “My mother’s chowder flipped in the wind and landed on her lap. / I wiped her up with a bunch of napkins. / My sister rescued the rolling bag of clam cakes.” “What My Mother Left Behind, What She Discarded,” a list poem of letting go, will surely be relatable to anyone who’s helped an aging parent clean out their home: “she’d given away the frying pans too heavy to lift / . . . / my dad’s bicentennial quarters (he collected one from every state) / . . . / the Encyclopedia Britannica . . .” Details like these are specific and touching.

 

As Pink Lady continues, Duhamel is able to weave in themes from the wider world. In “Wackadoodle,” the poet recalls when her mother had still been able to travel:

She visited me in Florida the day after

Trump won in 2016. When I’d sent her a ticket,

I thought we’d both be celebrating

the first woman president. I was baffled, sure

that the planes of the world would stop flying,

their wings too heavy with grief.

“Communique: Emails from Mount St. Rita’s” tersely describes what so many who had loved ones in hospitals or nursing homes went through during the Covid lockdowns, and “Purse” offers a sensual metaphor:

I emptied her white purse—

tissue pack and reading glasses, coupons

and address book. I once lived in a purse

inside her, my first pink home, the umbilical cord

a knotted strap. When I grew up, I took care

of my own purse, its pristine lining never stretched

or stuffed with a fetus.           

Of course, any narrative arc about death can only lead one way, as related in “Baby Mouse, July 11, 2021:” “I’d gotten up early as I’d heard / clanking. My sister found a baby / mouse in her sink . . . What did the mouse / mean, if anything?” Duhamel and her family arrive at the nursing home to find “My mom was under / a white sheet, her eyes closed . . . We whispered as though my mom / could still hear. We were quiet / as three little mice.”

 

Despite Pink Lady’s deep current of grief, the collection ultimately opens possibilities for renewal after the death of a parent, as in “Poem in Which I Banish Sorrow”:

I have my mother in my pocket—her face

on the prayer card we had printed for her wake.

I ate oatmeal with maple syrup for breakfast

so how can the front page news hurt me?

 

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Abundant Life

New and Selected Poems

Hank Lazer
Chax Press ($34)

by Jefferson Hansen

A profound playfulness characterizes Hank Lazer’s Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems. Ranging from formal experiments to handwritten “shape” poems, the pieces here move from one revelation to another, but they are all grounded in everyday life and firmly rooted in Lazer’s improvisatory writing practices.

Lazer’s explorations of form are often delivered in “serial heuristics,” which the author describes in his Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008 (Omnidawn, 2008) as “the developing of a particular procedure or form or set of rules for a series of poems which become . . . how I will live in poetry for that period.” The earliest collections from which Abundant Life selects contain such experiments. Days (Lavender Ink, 2002), for example, features ten-line poems that are dense with word play and seeming non-sequiturs. There is an off-beat, rhythmically knotty quality to these poems:

i sing the body
eclectic uh defective
icing the bawdy
directive rodin to young
rilke   “toujours travailler”
all words & no fray
makes yack a dull
“stable & precarious”
Rose on licorice er
icarus’ wings

Lazer here plays with Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” along with an instruction the sculptor Rodin gave to the poet Rilke—“work all the days”—which Lazer then uses as a springboard to riff on the saying “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” rhyming “fray” for “play” and changing “work” to “words” and “Jack” to “yack.” He also suggests the hesitancy of improvisation with the quasi-words “uh” and “er” and bounces between allusions (there’s Icarus, of course, but also John Dewey and Gertrude Stein toward the end) in an offbeat, herky-jerky rhythm that mimics how thinking can come fitfully.

Abundant Life switches gears with one of Lazer’s most important poems, “Deathwatch for My Father,” from Elegies and Vacations (Salt Publishing, 2004). This is a long, diary poem with dated sections that pertain to Lazer’s experience on that day as his father was dying of leukemia. He begins by asking:

                  why am i
writing  in the face of
your dying

Several pages later, after recounting his father’s gallows humor and their talk of golf, Lazer seems to have an answer, culled in part from poet George Oppen:

     he would i know
encourage me  (& perhaps has
in writing this poem)  to
test poetry in the face
of the worst events

This is perhaps the most self-referential reflection in the poem, which insists on the dailiness of facing the anguish of a dying loved one. Lazer describes fighting tears as he goes golfing alone to honor his and his father’s love of the sport. Even amidst anguish, however, Lazer finds room for playfulness; in a kind of mid-line acrostic, he spells his father’s name:

                               not one prinCipally given to words
                                  but works Hard these
                                                  lAst days
                                            to wRite a series of thank you notes
the one to warren worries him a Lot
                                                  hE can’t get it right
                                  with the noSe

Lazer turns to religion as a subject matter around 2005. Never devotional or dogmatic, he is interested in profound religious experience, not the institutions and their sometimes-numbing rituals. He describes himself as a Jewish Buddhist agnostic; in his recently published (and self-deprecatingly titled) What Were You Thinking: Essays 2006–2024 (Lavender Ink, 2025) he asserts that religious experience is “analogous to the reading experience of innovative poetry—an enigmatic encounter that requires patience, open-mindedness (in Zen terminology, the beginner’s mind), and the development of an ability (negative capability?) to live in uncertainty and with an ethical humility that suggests the incompleteness of our understandings.” For him, religious practice and innovative poetry both offer contemplative opportunities to keep the world fresh, open, and complicated.

In the 2010s Lazer developed a new form of writing: shape poems. This work is handwritten in cursive, with lines that roam freely about; sometimes the writing is even upside down, forcing the reader to rotate the page. These poems also include short quotations from philosophers Martin Heidegger, Emmanual Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the last of this series of books, Slowly Becoming Awake (Dos Madres Press, 2019), integrates quotations from the 13th-century Zen Buddhist monk Eihei Dogen (e.g., “Do not treasure or belittle what is far away, but be intimate with it. Do not treasure or belittle what is near, but be intimate with it”). As with his other books that use quotation, Lazer chooses passages that are free from jargon and have meaning for readers unfamiliar with the thinker, and Slowly Becoming Awake uses about five different colors of ink, adding to its visual playfulness.

After his spate of shape poems, Lazer perhaps cheekily titled his next collection Poems That Look Just Like Poems (Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2019). Sure enough, these are left-justified typewritten poems with short lines. The first of them, “As If,” reads:

i begin
each day
(which is already
a false statement)
attending to my
study & the yard
the bird feeders
the weather
certain that this
simplified world
exceeds my under
standing of it

With its immediate parenthetical disclaimer, “As If” gets at the rich complexity Lazer senses in “this / simplified world.” Immediacy is a value for Lazer; he tells us in What Were You Thinking that he rarely revises his poems, preferring them to be “of the moment,” and this momentariness consistently honors the specificity of the writing act as it occurred amid moods, attentional foci, obsessions, and sensible facts. For Lazer, everything is always different than it was. In its generalizing tendencies, language can give the lie to this abundance, but poetry can run counter to this tendency, reminding the writer and the reader of how specific, and precious, an individual moment is.

Lazer has continued his lean into life’s abundance in the current decade. In Covid 19 Sutras (Lavender Ink, 2020), he uses a variety of forms—centered four-line stanzas, serially indented four-line stanzas, long-lined free verse—to capture the grinding fear and dread during the pandemic, as in a poem about his elderly mother’s hospitalization:

     i think
   you are
 on your way
& it pains me

      that i
  that no one
    can be
   with you

In Pieces (BlazeVox, 2022), which lifts its title from a Robert Creeley book, Lazer pays homage to a “brown dog / actively sniffing / everywhere” and to a beloved uncle, a Biblical scholar who talked to God on his porch in the mornings, concluding that “anything seen / in an enlightened manner / becomes revelatory.” One could hardly put it more economically than that, but Lazer fleshes out his spiritual aesthetics in What Were You Thinking when he writes,

at the heart of spiritual experience is gratitude for consciousness, and some means of reflecting upon both that gratitude and the nature and possibilities of consciousness . . . If spiritual experience is in some way centered in the fact and experiencing of consciousness, no wonder then the intimacy of spiritual experience and language. And thus no wonder the intimacy and inter-dependency of spiritual experience and poetry.

For Lazer, poetry is akin to spiritual experience because both cause us to appreciate the countless particulars around us. Life is always more than we think it is, and Lazer’s entire poetic career has been reminding us of this plenty. An Abundant Life indeed.

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Chronicle of Drifting

Yuki Tanaka
Copper Canyon Press ($17)

by John Bradley

Although Surrealism is among the most important artistic movements of the past hundred years, the adjective “surreal” has largely lost its connection to the unconscious and the marvelous. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines “surreal” as “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream,” which is adequate, if lackluster. To witness the power of the surreal to startle and delight, readers should open Yuki Tanaka’s debut poetry collection Chronicle of Drifting, which demonstrates that Surrealism is very much alive.

The title poem consists of sixteen prose poems, all quietly surreal. Here’s the eighth, typical of the series:

A stray cat in an alley in Yotsuya. I had no food but I made a gesture of food inviting the cat but she didn’t come. The locksmith there was wonderful, taught me how to fix my apartment key, which had been bent when it got too close to a kerosene stove at the train station. He reheated it with a burner, until the key glowed in front of us, and he used pliers to unbend it, like setting a broken tail straight. The cat in my head cried in pain, but I patted her to be quiet. Went home with a bag of strawberries, lettuce, oysters, but my head was full of dry things. Someone walking outside. Voice of a sweet-potato seller with a shy trumpet. I can’t make music, not being a piano. But as a child, I kicked sand into the ferns, making the sound of light rain.

There’s a dream-like narrative here, as in the other prose poems in this series, with surprising turns, from a cat to a locksmith to “someone walking outside”; at times associative patterns can be seen, as in the closing lines that move from “shy trumpet” to “not being a piano” to kicking up “the sound of light rain.” The delightful ease and sense of whimsy Tanaka conjures reinforce the playful transformations of self that “Chronicle of Drifting” so expansively relates.

Although this is Tanaka’s first book, he has also translated, with poet Mary Jo Bang, a selection of poems by the Japanese Surrealist Shuzo Takiguichi (1903-1979); in their introduction to A Kiss for the Absolute (Princeton University Press, 2024), Bang and Tanaka say of Takiguchi that his “I” is “a constructed poetic entity—an impish shape-shifter who dashes quickly through a world overflowing with associative imagery.” The same could be said of Tanaka’s own work. In the opening of “Like One Who Has Mingled Freely with the World,” the speaker is imitating a bird: “Surrounded by children, I leap up / with a huge silk scarf around my shoulders // to look like a crane.” But in the very next line, everything changes: “They laugh and laugh / and push me into a rabbit skin and watch.” Just like that, our narrator is now a rabbit “with long ears” who hopes “they’ll let me in”—and it’s only the third stanza of a nine-stanza poem! The speaker then tells us of an earlier mingling, when a “girl in a wedding kimono / . . . screamed when I popped up from the rice paddy // like a big frog.” Near the end of the poem, the speaker holds an umbrella “up against the clear sky,” sounding rather human, at least temporarily.

While Tanaka’s roots can be traced to classic Surrealism, the worlds he creates are unlike any other. In “Prognosis at Midnight,” the speaker reads about a “grandmother” who “fell down the stairs and broke her hip.” This triggers a fantasy where the speaker has his chauffer take him to this woman to “comfort her”:

                                         I’d say, I read about you, I’m terribly sorry,
            this is my cockatoo, he’s twelve and loves carrots.
            We’d share her hospital dinner and be happy.
            Other sick people gather around us, admiring my cockatoo,
            who looks proud in his cage, unfurling his light-pink wings,
            like stage curtains, and I’m his assistant.

The fantasy continues, no longer feeling like a daydream but like an actual narrative, albeit a fantastical one. Here, as in most of the collection, there’s a casual ease, an effortlessness to the poem’s movement. The only poems that feel strained are in the section “Discourse on Vanishing”; a note in the back of the book explains that these are erasures of Tanaka’s doctoral dissertation. No wonder they feel enervated.

This is a minor issue, however, in a wondrous debut book. Only in Chronicle of Drifting could a reader hear “Tonight, after rain / I’d like you to fly through these irises, // your blue mustache, blue cheeks / infected with sky.”

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Crane

Tessa Bolsover
Black Ocean ($18)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

Tessa Bolsover’s Crane is an exercise in indexing and meshing. Though many poetry collections invest in the interconnectedness of words, concepts, and experiences, writers like Bolsover and her touchstones (including Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe, whose epigraph opens the book) strive to show the undercurrent beneath language’s seemingly obvious connections. Bolsover successfully immerses the reader in a cycle of reemerging motifs and ideas, a subliminal sublime that only poetry hinging on metaphor can concoct.

Crane is made up of three sections: “Crane,” “Delay Figure,” and “Inlet.” In the first, Bolsover offers an index that multiplies meanings among the Roman deity Janus and the figure Crane or Cardea, goddess of hinges. Its use of myth and archive recalls works such as Susan Howe’s Songs of the Labadie Tract, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Bolsover redefines her myth texts by discursively dissecting related words and indulging in etymological connections/confusions to cause the reader to question what is known or knowable. For instance, the name “Cardea” is said to be a leap, a hinge, a mechanical beam holding together, a line delimiting, an intersection, and a solstice. Interrelating these concepts as a barrage, Bolsover immerses the reader in a poetic flow that is both pleasant and disorienting, polluting the boundaries between stories to “willfully create error,” as Bolsover quotes from Anne Carson. The interrelation or hinge mechanism is more vital than the door itself. Crane/Cardea isn’t as well remembered as Janus, the god who looks both ways, but Crane is necessary in the way that the spaces between words both “connect and hold apart” to facilitate meaning. As Bolsover puts it, “the unsaid within the said lends a word both its particularity and its instability.”

For Crane and its forebears, true poetic potency is a capacity to explore the depths of an image through its instability. Bolsover tells us, “I do not want to draw equivalencies, but to place objects beside one another and witness how a surface shimmers in and out of form and loss itself”; the tender expectation of that loss is rendered by a surface that loses itself in tactical line breaks and shifts from lineated poetry to blocks of prose throughout the book, along with moments of transition or quotation that bring the reader above the lyric flow. One such transitional moment returns to Howe’s opening epigraph, in which the calendar, a mechanism intended to create order and clarity, is torn to pieces and tossed into the snow—units still differentiable but ultimately confounding.

Sound becomes a source of meaning (and meaninglessness) in “Delay Figure,” which also explores the capacity for archive to both hold and evade meaning. Nathaniel Mackey’s blues and cry of “Cante Moro,” itself an inherited evasion of meaning from ancestors such as Federico García Lorca, guides this part of the text along with other citations. Music, here, represents a more complete dismemberment of meaning amidst delicate sonics like “a numb limb shimmers,” and echoes in this section, like the echoes of Howe at the end of “Crane,” reinforce the expanded meanings referentiality creates—cords of mist that “run the seam of shore.”

Crane’s obsession with citation, indexing, and other trappings of the archive create some moments in which silence or metaphor would speak louder than the quotation on the page. These can feel like a poet’s cliché, akin to overusing words like “ghost” or “body” or reveling in the etymology of “essay.” Parts of “Delay Figure” also feel drily academic, citing works on Western theory by Édouard Glissant and Amanda Weidman at length. Even so, these heady moments seem to self-consciously hold a mirror up to postmodern poetics and its penchant for elucidating meaning via quotation rather than by sheer flow.

The strongest passages of Crane lean into associations and follow thought-trails away from quotation—giving rise to the possibility that the quotations were deployed as necessary foils to bring out the beauty in these associative moments. Like the work of each writer and thinker it cites, Crane rewards multiple readings for those who wish to submerge themselves in the spaces between what can be remembered and dismembered, the unsayable and the essential—however we point to it.

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Document

Amelia Rosselli
Translated by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard
World Poetry ($24)

by Greg Bem

We were looking for a crossing last night
not a clear country road nor a city street
but a simple passage: we found
death! as always, death!

The latest book by Italian poet Amelia Rosselli to be translated into English is her sprawling third collection, Document. Originally published in 1976, it captures a significant chapter of the late poet’s life, where daily musings and reflections were chiseled into literary form and experimentation. This marvelous bilingual edition is also a challenge to readers in its size and scope, offering over 400 pages of complex thoughts and linguistic layers.

Document searches a world moving past one arm of authoritarianism and fascism into new, confusing chapters. Rosselli’s intensely crafted book is both large and elegant, filled with intentional arrangements of verse that are inspired by the Petrarchan sonnet yet also offer the postmodern pleasures of sequential structure and call and response between poems. The poet invites the reader to critically examine the text through its relentless references and embedded connections, as in “Concatenation of causes: you’ve seen the shadow”:

Teargas bombs: they chose a field
completely indifferent to you to fraternize
with the strike of renouncing
yourself: that it was you, and so my

beating heart doesn’t want peace only oblivion

on the highest branch of the sky.

Though much of the book was written by 1969, the poems cover events between 1966 and 1973. The subject matter is intensely autobiographical, and the lack of context may occasionally feel frustrating; the editors acknowledge there isn’t nearly enough space in the text itself to address this, and offer a handful of notes in the back of the book to give the reader a sense of the poet’s journey through her own work. Still, even without biographical context, Rosselli’s poetry appears crafted through absorption—of the world and its trauma, its overbearing weights, its peripheries within shadows—leaving the reader with mystery and a phantasmagorical surfacing of images and settings.

It’s fortunate that Document comes in a bilingual format, because Rosselli’s poems are a joy to read across both languages. Her careful attention to musicality—the poet was, in fact, also an accomplished musician—leads to powerful moments in punctuation, syntax, and the line, as seen in “Cold is scary and blood too”:

I’m cold today and I don’t know why a new
attitude sifts through my heart: but
it’s not true that tomorrow is certain
and it’s not true that today is calm.

These acrobatics in logic reflect a mind that is curious, wandering, and far from satisfied. Rosselli’s work in Document yields many emotional and psychic tributaries of thought, though many of them are deceiving; a poem may feel or allude to doom and malaise on its first read, only to offer confidence and critical inquiry on its second. Take these lines from “Flanking the empty tree the ants’”:

                       What could it have been
this arid genius that put so many obstacles

in the way of a richer safeguard? Maybe
life is defeated and has no species resolved
to fight evil.

Emerging out of incredibly transformative years in the 1960s and ¢70s, these poems are deeply embedded in contemporary moral inquiries across disciplines, and while they may be presented neatly, they are far from neat; their kaleidoscopic nature resonates.

It would be remiss to not mention Rosselli’s death by suicide approximately thirty years after the poems in this book were written. The editors describe the work of this collection as profound, as it established the arrival of Rosselli’s poetry when it was first published; Rosselli’s was indeed a profound voice of the postwar period, offering comments through a raw and emerging anti-fascist lens in Europe. How might Document inspire readers in another chapter, as we watch the world corrode with fascism again? Translator Roberta Antognini’s afterword provides Rosselli’s emerging English-language audience with biographical information that may inspire some answers, as well as further exploration of her work.

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The Odds

Suzanne Cleary
NYQ Books ($18.95)

by Peter Mladinic

In the poem “I Go Back, as I Am Today,” from Suzanne Cleary’s latest collection The Odds, Mr. Winslow, a teacher in an eighth grade classroom, wonders aloud if he should have read his students the E.A. Robinson poem “Richard Corey,” as it reflects the recent death of one of their classmates; like the man in Robinson’s poem, the classmate, William, died by his own hand. Mr. Winslow, his back to the class, wonders if he did the right thing or the wrong thing. The buses that will take his students home are yellow, like the “long hedge aflare with forsythia” out the window, while Cleary’s speaker sees “for the first time the bravery / . . . of displaying doubt to others.” The irony lies in the poet’s certainty: If there is any doubt, as surely as there must be, in these poems written by a woman alone in a room with language, it is all behind the scenes. The presentations on the page are rendered in a voice of certainty; like the forsythia, they are unmutable, and memorable. Cleary’s attentiveness to people, places, and things gives her poems access to the metaphorical resonance beneath the surface.

Thing-oriented poems involve the speaker’s discovering and placing her findings in an epistemological context. “Worry Stone” begins with a stone in a pocket, and ends with a boulder, encircled by small stones, near a house in the country. The speaker wonders which came first, the house or the boulder. She pictures a woman in the house, and finally the boulder flying over the roof, leaving the woman unharmed (beating the odds). The epistemological link between the stone and the boulder is forged by the imagination. Similarly, in “Lovespoon,” the spoon’s carved “hearts and doves and bells” are linked “with cables and braids and knots” stitched into “Aran / sweaters knit to protect the sailor / from cold” and “to identify the body washed ashore.” Gloves, artificial wings, a bumper sticker, a mural, a poem by Robert Bly, and an Emily Dickinson poem are among other objects Cleary includes. One entity of nature that appears is Dan, an endearing bulldog; another, which has no name, is a large snake that appears in a hot, dry dusty place, near a water trough. The speaker saw the snake daily

from her attic studio, the snake 
           sunning itself on the top of the stone wall,

all near-six-feet of it shining like black oil,
            like a slice of midnight come early 

               then gone, woven back into summer’s grasses.

When the speaker discovers that the snake has been raiding her hen house, she gets it into a thick sack, places it on her truck’s floorboard, drives to a mountain’s edge, and releases it into the wild, thus relinquishing, in this instance, 

the beauty that sometimes one sees
         and sometimes disappears for weeks,

invisible, though it spread itself long and shining
             in clear sight, hungry.

There is great variety in the places in these poems: an emergency room, classrooms, art galleries, studios, a park, an opera house, a college campus, a CVS drugstore, a virtual Zoom, winding roads, neighborhoods, and basement stacks in The New York Public Library serve as stages for narratives to unfold and be resolved. In “Bumper Sticker,” a stretch of road is described in images that lend credence to the book’s title, The Odds. Anna, the minister’s wife does not want her faith displayed on a bumper sticker. Driving the road her daughter drove when her daughter had an accident, she lives her faith. Fortunately, Anna’s daughter, Julia, survived the accident. As best she can, the speaker explains the odds:

No one is safe on that road built when cars were small and slow,

when trees now crowding the shoulder, their limbs overhanging, 
were saplings, planted not by gardeners but by wind carrying seeds
through the air and dropping them. We understand some things:

the air drops a seed, a bird eats the seed, the bird flies away,
The bird shits out the seed, which takes root. A tree grows.
A car hits the tree. The car is totaled. The girl lives, or not.

Just as the poems are particularized in form, content, and thematic concerns, so are the people. In “Emergency Room,” the book’s first poem, the speaker evokes empathy for her fellow-patients: “the construction worker holding his side / and the woman with long brown hair holding a baby.” In “Life Class” art students look at the model but do not start to draw or paint until they’ve left the model’s presence, because of “The first lesson: to see.” In “Baseball” a grandfather’s imagination conjures for himself and his grandsons the inner life of the beloved sport. Suzanne Cleary goes to the inner life in all of the poems in this collection, rendering a panorama of exacting images that emphatically evoke the joy of living—and that often underscore the idea that poetry is more about questions than answers. The Odds, in short, is one really good book. Poets and non-poets alike would do well to read it.

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The Ocean in the Next Room

Sarah V. Schweig
Milkweed Editions ($18)

by Walter Holland

In The Ocean in the Next Room, Sarah V. Schweig captures the flat affect of our digital lives by using a brand of oddly understated language to reflect uncertainty and dissociation. Drifting through mindless work routines and instances of first-world guilt, the collection moves through social notions of packaged enjoyment and family relations with an estranged viewpoint. Distracted, preoccupied, and ruminative, the speaker of these poems hovers in a twilight state between her laptop screen and the daily realities of social and environmental collapse.

A quiet observer, the speaker watches her daily performance of gender and transactional relations with her husband, a man who is paradoxically intimate and unintimate. Her deadpan narration about their relationship in the long poem at the heart of the book, “Unaccompanied Human Voice,” suggests a destabilized America:

When he lies down and blindly reaches for me,
I think of the economy of time. It’s thought

we’re grateful to lease our lives away, or should be.
Into our work-issued computers, we empty out

our minds. My husband and I pour our work
into our work-issued computers, connecting

and verifying through a virtual private network
neglecting to look up and at anything for hours.

Happy to be here! Happy to help! No problemo!
Just wanted to circle back on this! Can you circle

back on this? Can you approve my PTO?
Thanks!

Masterfully repetitious, the poem’s technologic think-speak and snatches of social banalities reflect a kind of human communication on autofill. But Schweig isn’t dependent on technology to power her ironic look at our blunted senses and civic malaise; “Waves,” for example, is another kind of treatise on the behavior of American privilege, alienation, and neurotic self-examination. In it, Schweig describes an ethically grotesque Caribbean vacation:

Here we are, in Barbados, at Waves Hotel and Spa.
We are three, now, with an infant son.
Every other guest is British, burnt pink and smoking.

The literal is all that’s left.
Our son cries, and for a few long seconds
I do nothing, keep writing.

Everyone has a penchant for cruelty, given opportunity.
Between feeds, I order a “mango breeze colada.”
By the highway men selling coconuts wield machetes.

The poem’s refrain, “The literal is all that’s left,” drives home the way our algorithmic culture has destroyed the mythic and the romantic, the analog and the figurative. As we enter the dawn of the AI era and its potential dehumanizing effects, The Ocean in the Next Room sounds the age-old warning about solipsism in the language of our times.

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A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet

Laura Isabela Amsel
Brick Road Poetry Press ($17.95)

by Danielle Hanson

Situated in the natural lushness of the American South and discussing a range of family dynamics, Laura Isabela Amsel’s A Brief History of Sting and Sweet delivers on both the sting and the sweet.

The core subject matter of these poems is family tumult—a cold and abusive father, cancer, raising children, the dissolution of marriage—yet there’s no hint of melodrama; instead, Amsel’s vulnerability encourages connection. Take “First Born,” a poem about becoming a mother:

   Looped cord cut free, bagged, he began—
his brown eyes jaundiced moon-yellow. He’d stutter at five,

refuse to wear shoes half his life. Dressed in anything
tight, he’d cry. Sock-seams overloaded his senses. He roams now,

looking for loose, running from confines—Bulgaria, Thailand.
He wears Tevas in winter to give his toes room.

As much as family, however, the poems also writhe with nature—snakes, salamanders, butterflies, frogs, squirrels, and plants crowd the scene and frequently suggest truths about human life. “Naming Moons” explores a sweet family tradition about full moons, while “Father” details the killing and pinning of butterflies and “Owls” portrays nature as an escape: “One leads the other follows / and I forget to breathe.” Elsewhere, the scar left from a mastectomy is referred to as “tender stem,” while salamanders are “sacred” because their scarcity. In later poems, the speaker finds solace in spring:

Don’t make me beg you, April.
God knows my knees ache
enough already. See me groveling
in March mud, raving,
staving spade holes
with cold fingers, jabbing
zinnia seeds in each.

In addition to using strong imagery, Amsel excels in her playfulness with language. “Listening for Something as a Girl, 1970” is filled with short i sounds and rhymes that speed up the poem and carry the reader away:

My vigilance is visceral;
there is no freeze in me.
I am all ear-swivel
and twitch, amygdala
and head hitch, tail
switch and quick shit,
adrenaline and flinch.

A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet brings us the lovely, the terrifying, and the sad experiences of family life, but in making them all connected to the natural world, it tones down the highs and modifies the lows into something more manageable. We are all part of this world, it seems to suggest—and it’s going to be okay.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket

Kinsale Drake
University of Georgia Press ($19.95)

by Danielle Shandiin Emerson

Kinsale Drake’s debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, composes a yucca-lined symphony of the lived and thriving groundwork of the Southwest, drawing on memory, music, and Diné poetics in the process. Each poem spreads honey-warm tendrils that inspire; with the feel of bare feet against damp dirt, we experience the breath of each stanza.

This collection could be summed up in one word: song. A memory song, an August song, a healing song, a southwest song, a mother song, a girlhood song, and so on. As Drake writes in the opening poem, “spangled,” “rip the sky // rush of birds spooked / from deep in our throats— // our song”—and the poems that follow demonstrate how music spreads across generations, how bodies become instruments and orchestras, and how memories of being loved and loving can be re-lived through music, can “overturn the sweet peas in the garden / . . . / the familiar orchestra / of scratched up CDs.”

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket also paints portraits of family lineages. Some memories we ourselves might not remember, but we still feel them deeply because our loved ones have passed them on to us, for better or for worse. From the collection, we’re reminded that remembering is familial and comforting, that “the people who have known / this land / see the slickrock / still emerging.” Indigenous existence is still emerging and ongoing, as conveyed in “after Sacred Water”: “So we tell our stories             Go to the water / Tend this land / & remember.”

Throughout the collection, the traditional archival experience is challenged and changed by one that centers the lived and living. “Wax Cylinder” examines the recordings of Diné elders singing. Locked in museum archives, their voices are so far from Dinétah (our homelands); in a way, these poems bring them home, even if just for a moment. It’s this love that makes our connection to further generations unbreakable and all the more beautiful.

A love letter to the southwest, Diné culture, and the inherent lyricism that storytelling bears, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket asks readers to reflect on their relationship to landscapes and histories that may not be a part of the dominant narrative. Drake extols the matrilineal, from girlhood to our masaní’s (grandmother’s) wisdom; while we heal from intergenerational trauma, we’re also shown intergenerational joy. We’re shown striking depictions of love and community, especially as it’s formed over vast rural landscapes, and how it’s thrived for generations. Contrary to colonial narratives, Native communities are places of laughter, crying, living, breathing, smiling, trusting, singing, humming, and being: “How else to know / you enter a land of monuments, not / a wasteland, loved by radio waves,” the poet offers in “Put on that KTNN.” 

As the collection reaches its end, readers are embraced with active hope and healing. In “BLACKLIST ME,” Drake writes: “all the NDNs / dusting themselves off / and laughing at the smolder, / and the little wheel spin and spin / the little wheel spin.” Indeed, the world and we, as Native peoples—as Diné—will keep spinning and spinning, existing and living, in an old beauty.            

Nizhóní, it is beautiful.

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An Image Not a Book

Kylan Rice
Parlor Press ($16.95)

by Jami Macarty

Kylan Rice’s poetry collection An Image Not a Book takes its title from a line in Yeats’s 1917 dialogue poem “Ego Dominus Tuus” (which translates to “I am your Lord”), a phrase originating in turn from Dante’s La Vita Nuova. Rice’s poems craft a “branching opening” conversation with Yeats, Dante, and the reader, boldly asserting, “I am here to try to tell you / what I love.”

What better place to begin such a conversation than a wedding. Opening with “Epithalamium,” the collection introduces the marital scene and offers the first image to the reader’s eye: “a banquet in a field.” The following poem, “Garland,” presents ten intertwined portraits described as “[a garland of souls].” Together, these two poems chronicle the “strain / of assembly” and cue up the collection’s themes of eros—intimacy, promise, betrayal, abandonment, and apology. Throughout this exploration, Rice artfully holds “in tension” the observer and the observed, reminding us that “looking / in” does not equate to truly participating.

The reasons behind the poet’s sense of separation seem to relate to the concept of the “book” more than to that of “image,” suggesting a struggle with the very nature of his art form. Rice yearns for an image of “fidelity” intertwined with “levity” to soothe the restlessness accompanying his quest for connection amidst disconnection. His poems pulse with this tension, enacting a “bent-thorn syntax” and often evoking a feeling of wading through water “to the thigh” or “hip-high.” After being “loosened by a wound,” the poet craves fidelity to self and others, yet he grapples with the fear of losing sight of the line between realism and idealism, caught between “the object in the image” and “my desire for it.”

Ultimately, Rice’s poems wade deeply into the anxiety of the search and wrestle with the haunting fear of not finding the elusive ideal image. Striving for “something less / / than groundedness,” Rice beckons readers to join him in a quest for love amidst the paradox of existence as it “speaks its alternating oath of late / and soon.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025