Poetry Reviews

What God in the Kingdom of Bastards

Brian Gyamfi
University of Pittsburgh Press ($20)

by John Bradley

“I was made in Kumasi, Ghana,” states Brian Gyamfi in What God in the Kingdom of Bastards, his stunning debut book of poetry. This is no mere autobiographical detail, for the author’s African heritage is a source that continually enriches this collection’s thirty-five poems. It’s difficult to believe that this is Gyamfi’s first book, as his work exhibits both strong confidence and an original voice.

The very title of the book reflects this originality. While most poetry collections feature a title drawn from a poem in the book, nowhere in these pages will the reader find Gyamfi’s titular phrase. The poem “Kingdom” comes closest, and it does deal with religious matters, though in surprising ways: “It is said, Jesus killed fleas to save his dog. / Even a boy must perform acts of sadism.” The leap between those lines is thought-provoking to say the least. Later in the poem, the speaker tells us, “I once shoved wind into my brother’s mouth, / whispered in his ear, ‘the kingdom of God is a wild animal.’” There’s nothing cliched or reassuring about religion in this book.

Though Gyamfi’s poems are often visionary, they are not romantic, as can be seen, ironically, in “Our Romantics.” In this playful poem, “The earth shivers and a crowd of poodles / urinate by the streetlight.” Note how the initially cute image of the poodles is undone in the next line. Other unromantic images populate the poem—a cat chasing beetles, someone swallowing a sword—yet a woman in the poem “blooms as a daylily.” Paradoxes abound in Gyamfi’s work.

In “The Tree Carries Water,” set in New Mexico, we hear of a boy rescued from a river. The action is ambiguous but always evocative:

—I write this to understand the sorcerer in Benin:
the breaker of mountains, a heavy voice
in the story of a gardener fetching a boy from the river,
his hand under the heavy current, a beetle climbing a tree

Benin, a West African country not far from Ghana, is known as the birthplace of voodoo, and the poem has the hallucinatory quality often associated with that religion: The relationships between the sorcerer in Benin, the gardener in New Mexico, the voice, the beetle, all seem to shift as the rushing water threatens the boy’s life. Later in the poem, another layer of complexity is added: “in my thoughts, the sorcerer in Benin is the river.” Rather than confuse, however, the ambiguity adds depth and mystery.

Gyamfi is unafraid to challenge the reader. The longest poem in the book at twelve pages, “Praxis of Being,” uses a form that resembles a notebook, with entries separated by a dash, and it continually evokes Nobel-Prize-winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, not only in an epigraph but in direct references throughout, such as: “Soyinka’s words dictate anger is not a pomposity for justice, you / say, fidgeting.” You should know Soyinka’s work, Gyamfi implies.

While allusive, “Praxis of Being” is also highly personal. Some of the most moving lines in the book can be found in this poem: “In 2013, I detangled mother’s braids, brushed them out gently / and braided them again. I kissed her long fingers.” The tenderness of this recollection follows the news that “mother will soon lose her memory.” Gyamfi’s most devastating observation, though, might be this double-barreled one near the end of the piece: “We are all just lonely. That’s a quiet sentence.”

Gyamfi’s many Ghanian cultural references can be confusing at first for readers not already familiar—in “New World,” for example, we hear, “The word petrichor does not exist in our language. / There’s no equivalent in Ewe or Ga”—but the poet’s multilingual engagement with sense and meaning making ultimately pays off. “I am a person in many languages,” Gyamfi reminds us later in the book. Like Whitman, his poetic identity is expansive, and his poetry is affecting not despite its complexities, but often because of them. What God in the Kingdom of Bastards introduces an exciting new voice in American poetry, with the promise of more ground-breaking work to come.

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Fuel

Rosie Stockton
Nightboat Books ($17.95)

by Walter Holland

Fuel, the second collection by Rosie Stockton, presents a complex poetry of disruptive and transformative language culminating in a strange lyric beauty. Central to this book is a queer love for a “you,” be it an aspect of the speaker, a lover, the Earth, or the creational force which made our world and still drives it forward. Their poems often emerge in cascading columns, outpourings fraught with evolutionary images from natural history, but always tied to the ache of human desire and love. Stockton’s style is an adept process of collage and décollage, taking strips of writings from visionary poets who sought to explain the mysteries of our world and the perplexing nature of love and combining them into an unstable accretion of oddly colliding imagery, an admirable and unsettling bric-a-brac. Stockton offers us their own creation story for our fragmented world, and how it is fueled, why we are driven and continue living. Is it by desire, by love? They do not offer easy answers.

The notes section reveals the collection’s ambition and lineage, explaining that “This book reverbs with the words of others” mentioning Ovid’s, Metamorphoses, Bernadette Mayer’s Soule Serman, Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations and other texts including Jacques Lacan’s Desire and its Interpretation. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in 8 CE by the Roman poet, defied easy classification and alluded to “transformations” such as those from animals to humans, inanimate objects to humans, one sex to another sex, representing gender as mutable. In this sense Metamorphoses has recently been seen as a queer text, one that posits transsexuality and non-binary gender as inherent, and, that the entire world is mutable and shape-shifting, epicurean and materialistic, made of atoms ever reconfigured as Lucretius described.

A broad genre-defying poem of mythology and literature, Ovid’s poem addressed the myths of transformation, and the recurring theme of love, both personal love and love personified by the gods and nature. Stockton nods to this mythic slant in the collection’s “Pumpjack” section. There, Stockton takes us from “layers of dead sea creatures” through “mud and plankton” to “landing on air” to “shale rock” and “oil fields,” “Roman fascism” to “global big block stores.” Stockton moves through evolutionary, geologic, and human time. There are interesting flashes as well of Rimbaud’s symbolist and fin de siècle surreal imagery, illustrating the illusory world of transformations, synesthesia, and changes in perception. They speak of

velvet corpses, polluted, unassimilable each unit
our aromas muzzled together
a Luddite tactic too heavy to lift
lulling tariffed cargo with uninsured joints
murderous orators in ecstasy

As with Ovid’s transformations, often metatextual and embedded within funny and absurd grammatical and narrative constructions, Stockton creates with Fuel their own metamorphoses, perhaps drawing on their perspective of a non-binary life, a life that understands the absurd transformational shifts in gender, the upturning of those myths, and the resulting disruption to our present-day creation myths and varied beliefs on human behavior.

In fact their poems seethe with ongoing internal and external shifts, doubts, social critiques, guilt, anguish, and ceaseless revolt against itself, which Stockton alludes to in the book’s epigraph from Frank Bidart’s “Guilty of Dust”: “Whether you love what you love//or live in divided ceaseless revolt against it//what you love is your fate.”

In “Dispersal,” Stockton writes:

I finger a bur
I want to be nothing
but of things
& if I am more me
next to you
it’s because relation
made me this way
like light, you hit me
when I ask you to
I let flood emboss me
I dress up straw men
just to find new ways
to love all I extravagantly
destroy
braced for fire season
all that makes us
possible, before our candle
swallows the wick
and that summer darkness drenches us
here, I feel the story so many ways
I have to lay down

Fuel is not within the Language school of poetry or adjacent elliptical styles of previous decades per se; rather, it responds to and moves into Stockton’s own hybrid language for the current world of streaming and the fragmented flow of news and information, where verbs are often mismatched to nouns, metaphors are always mixed, pronouns are transferred fluidly, and synesthesia holds sway. Stockton exhibits wildly inventive phrases such as “I let flood emboss me” and “summer darkness drenches us,” capturing with virtuosity the new argot of our impatient texting world, with its autofill distortions, purposeful interruptions, opposing images taken from advertising and capitalistic speech, all of it joined or turned around. But in this sonic disjoint there is the address to a “you,” a “you” which may be the speaker, a facet of the speaker, or a beloved other. This makes for rare and wonderous images, mashups of verbs and nouns and adjectives in a viscous emulsion.

Fuel is full of humor, but like in Old English there is provocative and active physical roughness:

the verification system we annihilate
the shackled fantasy of aching feet, adrenal shame
and lip liner in the cozy hour molding fantasy of intimacy
how oil money rots virile our pleasure leaking to the front-end strike
and back-end theft slipping through power. . .

Also from “Dispersal:”

we are the only people
today shrugging stunning
how the stolen Snake River
confronts stone
volcanic battery life
surges hungry snacks
litter my lining
strained for you
this is loving. I walk so
fast wanting water
eddies to ghost, wanting
to point myself out
to you, there, there
and there

Stockton’s poems move us through a world littered with units of free-floating language, from “Chevron’s unliberated future scenarios” to “eddies of ghost”; they show us how human desire and love always seek expression, always point toward the mysterious soul “there, there/ and there.” Perhaps most importantly, they show us transformation is possible and has been the basis of all creation since the dawn of time.

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Elegies of the Earth

Selected Poems

Ahmad Shamlou
Translated by Niloufar Talebi
World Poetry ($24)

by Patrick James Dunagan

The poetry of Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) towers over 20th-century Iranian literature, but has been too little appreciated outside the Middle East. Fortunately, Niloufar Talebi’s translations in Elegies of the Earth offer the most comprehensive selection of his poems yet to appear in English. Shamlou, who never earned a high school diploma and was imprisoned several times, found in poetry a venue for expressing the inexplicable. He eschewed traditional Persian poetic forms, writing free verse that blended the richness of Persian visual tropes and surrealist leaning metaphors with a stylized self-scrutiny. As Talebi describes in an introduction, Shamlou’s poems “synthesize East and West, the classical with the contemporary, the high and low to invent language that propelled Persian poetry into the pulse of a rapidly evolving Iran. . . . Without sacrificing its depth, he democratized his literary mode, giving voice to the ‘everyman’ in a range of registers.”

The clarity and immediacy of Shamlou’s work is indeed striking. What exactly a poem is “about” may not be entirely clear, but the imagery and associated feeling are always animated; as well, there’s an easy-going dreamlike fluidity to his descriptions of abstruse scenes, though they are nevertheless loaded with emotional heft. Take these lines from “I Can’t Help But Be Beautiful”:

in my world
blood
is never the spirit laid bare
and the fear of lead
doesn’t deter the partridge
from its strut

Talebi knew Shamlou personally, and she attests to his magnetism, saying, “he was the sun around which everyone at my parents’ secret literary salons in Tehran gathered. I recall him abruptly retreating from our bustling living room, where he was holding court, into a bedroom because a poem had seized him, demanding immediate transcription.” Even if enigmatic at times, his poems are deeply personal; in Shamlou’s own words, “My work is my complete autobiography. Poetry isn’t just an interpretation of life—it’s life itself.” He embeds weighted depth into mundane existence, as in “Still Life”:

An obscure book and
a burnt-to-ashes cigarette next to the forgotten cup of tea.
A forbidden thought
on the mind.

While Talebi’s selection of poems, drawn from the full range of Shamlou’s oeuvre, succeeds in delivering some sense of his poetic purview, one might wish for more commentary upon his life and the poems themselves. Talebi supplies footnotes for many of the poems, but they leave much unsaid. For instance, Shamlou has a number of poems scattered throughout volumes across the years with an overarching title of “Nocturnal,” which would seem to indicate some specific reference linking these poems together for him (a disrupted poem-series coming in fits and starts over an extended period of time)—yet Talebi supplies no information in this regard. As if in expectation of such grousing, she offers this short explanation: “I had prepared a lengthy introduction filled with biography and analysis, drawn from my previous writings about Shamlou. But let’s just get straight to the poems.”

Given ongoing current developments within Iran—where the people are in a perpetual state of peril under the brutality of the regime, thousands have been gunned down in the streets for daring to rise up and express discontent, and war with the United States continues—Shamlou’s poetry is a welcome demonstration of the vibrant cultural and imaginative resources of the Persian people and a dependable bulwark to lean against whatever the future holds. Let’s let him have the last word with these lines from “Nocturnal (Among the Eternal Suns)”:

Your gaze
is the fall of tyranny—
a gaze that dressed
my bare soul
in love
so fully that now
the darkest night of never
feels like nothing but a comedy of ironies.
Your eyes told me
tomorrow
is a new day—

Poetry Reviews

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Ecstasy

Alex Dimitrov
Alfred A. Knopf ($29)

by Walter Holland

Alex Dimitrov, a clear and artful descendent of Frank O’Hara, richly appropriates the heady musings of the 1980s and 1990s, when Nan Goldin photoshoots in despondent shadowy doorways and bathroom stalls documented a version of New York City that has all but disappeared. Take “Another Party,” an early poem in his new collection Ecstasy, which begins:

            An orange streak in the sky!
            Before I go in I smoke
            with the roses on Fifth.
            They’re drenched from the rain
            and perfectly dressed.
            The party is beautiful.
            The windows are French.
            The windows are open
            although it’s not time
            to jump out of them yet!

Here, Dimitrov mimics the whimsy and sarcasm of O’Hara’s blithe conversational banter and “Personism,” adding a nice dose of Dorothy Parker’s flippant bite. Skilled at capturing the camp cadences of the past, Dimitrov takes us through the lonely quotidian of 1980’s and ‘90’s East Village bohemianism; he can speak the dark New York chic of Capote as he name-drops designer labels, makes cocktail banter, and pines away with belabored sexual longing in his favored Manhattan restaurant. His range of settings roams from trendy bar to trendier eatery, always pitch-perfectly capturing the despairing intonations (laced with shots of acidic self-pity) that attend the sophisticate poet. The collection’s queer urban voice feels generally authentic, though at moments a bit posed and heavy on the world-weariness.

Boredom in the midst of privilege and American materialistic decadence seems just one of Dimitrov’s fallback themes. “Gold Amex,” for example, glows with cynicism:

The city glitters like a gold Amex.
A guy lifts his shirt and shows you his scar.
You lose your ID. The palms rustle.
Someone asks if it’s Tuesday . . .

Dimitrov is fascinated with the disillusioned cadences of American writers who wallowed in the wake of New York’s heyday, but the East Village of queer criminals and dissident bad boys no longer exists as he conceives it; his jaded cosmopolitanism is almost now a genre in itself in American literature. Though at times repetitive or nostalgic, his soliloquies are magnificently melancholy, and his flickers of international settings serve the poems nicely, as in “Paris”:

                                            I drank holy water
            from the church on Rue du Temple.
            I couldn’t remember names
            and I couldn’t remember hours
            especially after ten, after sunset
            after everything I thought I wanted
            was here and not mine anymore.

Here, Dimitrov mixes Weltschmertz with just the right accord of wit, humor, and vulnerability. One senses a lonely reach for mid-century drugs-sex-rock-and-roll nihilism and the desire for a new entourage of rebel co-conspirators—though he may have to settle for the less glamorous company of jaded millennials.

Despite my sense of his manqué poetic voice, Dimitrov is a poet of effete aesthetic savvy and emotional truth who understands lacerations of spirit. There is something of Fitzgerald in him, a tragic sensibility; his urbane ennui has the bored auteur spirit of Andy Warhol in his diaries (in fact the cover image is taken from Warhol’s 1964 film Blow Job, a fitting bit of kitsch), as well as the raw, desolate view of David Wojnarowicz. He’s good at reflecting a past of elitist boredom, educated solipsism, and melancholy, but if he’d step out of the shadows and address the hard realities of now with that deeper voice he conceals within, he would better help us to feel the currency of the new and the present.

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Lola the Interpreter

Lyn Hejinian
Wesleyan University Press ($18.95)

by Luke Harley

Lola the Interpreter, the final work by Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024), stands as a crowning achievement of her career as an experimental poet. A sequel of sorts to Saga/Circus (Omnidawn, 2008), it continues her exploration of hybrid forms uniting poetry and prose, autobiography and fiction, and observation and citation—what Hejinian’s fellow Language poet Barrett Watten terms a “combinatorial poetics.” Structured in seven sections—each introduced by a color plate of Hejinian’s own design—the book arrives like a consoling breeze in today’s climate of political extremism. In its embrace of allegoresis, a literary strategy which Hejinian claims as a form of critique, it refuses to buckle to authoritarianism and the “technocratic takeover of reality.”

In Lola the Interpreter, the titular character is tasked with making sense of a destabilized world. First introduced in the “Circus” section of Saga/Circus as a bike-riding, book-loving child, Lola reemerges in this volume as a sharp-witted, affectionate, pragmatic adolescent—one playfully dressed in black jeans and a black Stetson, evoking the rebellious spirit of a literary cowgirl. Her transformation signals a shift from innocent observation to incisive critique as she confronts the “machinations of capitalism” and challenges a dystopian reality she deems “insufficiently artistic.” For Lola—a kind of muse for Hejinian—interpretation is resistance: her rationality and linguistic skill empower her to navigate (and subvert) the ideological structures that shape her world.

Like ours, the world that Lola inhabits is marked by “global interconnectivity, selective interconnectivity, changing urban demographics, extreme weather events, economic inequality, mass incarceration, homelessness, urban congestion, civic madness”; it is a world where eros has been “monetized” and almost every aspect of personhood is “weaponized for political ends.” Disillusioned, Lola and her friends yearn for lives of meaning and coherence. They seem to seek what Walter Benjamin, in his concept of Jetztzeit (now-time), calls the “mystical instant”—an allegorical moment that crystallizes into the “now” of historical consciousness.

For Hejinian, “allegorical thinking” offers a way out of the anxiety, fragmentation, and “dismal indifference” of contemporary life. In her essay collection Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), Hejinian champions poetic strategies such as parataxis, digression, and syntactic disruption, deploying them to challenge conventional narrative coherence and resist closure. Her “wayward poetry,” grounded in material particulars of “adamantine specificity,” opens a space for imaginative flourishing—including in Lola the Interpreter, where Hejinian conjures a self-effacing “tumult of language” that sends “waves of polysemy rolling through even the most quotidian, banal, pedestrian, and seemingly inconsequential of situations.”

Hejinian’s focus on material particulars—the “paltry objects of quotidian life”—bears some resemblance to Wordsworth’s elevation of the ordinary, yet Hejinian is certainly not a Romantic poet in the conventional sense. Her work has been shaped more by Russian Formalism, pragmatist philosophy, and critical theory than by Romanticism; if Lola the Interpreter stages a dialogue between Romantic poetry’s idealism and Language poetry’s skepticism toward narrative and lyrical unity, it is one in which the latter usually prevails.

Nevertheless, Hejinian was influenced by a foundational text that introduced many in the American avant-garde to the collaborative ethos of German Romanticism: Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s The Literary Absolute (SUNY Press, 1988). Moreover, her recent writing contains flashes of unexpected Romantic ambition, as if reviving ideas that remain relevant amid the complexities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In Saga/Circus, for instance, the “Saga” section—comprising thirty-seven nonlinear free-verse segments—invokes Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner through its metaphor of poetry as a sea-going vessel, navigating the unstable waters of perception and meaning. Similarly, her book-length poem-essay Positions of the Sun (Belladonna*, 2019) alludes to Wordsworth’s “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement” (1789), echoing his claim that it is “not in Utopia” but only “in the very world which is the world / Of all of us” that we “find our happiness, or not at all.”

As in earlier works such as My Life (Burning Deck, 1980) and My Life in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003), Hejinian is aligning herself with a tradition that locates moral clarity and fulfillment in lived experience rather than abstract ideals. Her engagement with Romanticism represents a sustained inquiry into the nature of human connection amid social fragmentation. Poetry, described in Lola the Interpreter as the “skeptic’s philosophy,” becomes a site of collective reflection and shared experience.

This anti-narcissistic ethos is conveyed through the rich intertextuality of Lola the Interpreter, where an eclectic ensemble of thinkers—among them Horace, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sextus Empiricus, Charles Baudelaire, Fred Moten, Michel Foucault, Clark Coolidge, Christa Wolf, Henry James, George Eliot, Albert Camus, Stan Brakhage, Sigmund Freud, Carla Harryman, William Blake, Louis Zukofsky, and Etel Adnan—are drawn into dialogue. Their presence evokes the “symphilosophizing” impulse of German Romanticism, inviting readers to become “lovers of linkage”: those who uncover unexpected connections and embrace a collaborative, expansive mode of inquiry. Through this polyphonic exchange, Hejinian celebrates the generative potential of shared thought, associative movement, and collective imagination.

Hejinian dedicated Lola the Interpreter—as she had nearly five decades earlier with A Mask of Motion (Burning Deck, 1977)—to her husband and fellow activist, avant-garde saxophonist Larry Ochs. The book’s architecture emulates the improvisational logic of Ochs’s music, particularly his long-standing work with the Rova Saxophone Quartet. Its open-ended sections engage themes such as skepticism, freedom, reason, beauty, time, memory, and dreams, unfolding them with the fluidity and unpredictability of a jazz composition. This improvisatory structure resonates with Benjamin’s concept of constellation, where meaning emerges through the relational configuration of fragments; much like Benjamin’s montage technique in The Arcades Project, Hejinian’s paratactic text resists narrative continuity, inviting readers to traverse “nodal singularities” that generate meaning through proximity, disjunction, and imaginative association.

In the book’s final section, Hejinian’s brief references to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Susan Howe’s Frame Structures set the stage for a striking intertextual gesture: a quotation from “Mode Z,” the opening poem in Barrett Watten’s 1–10 (This Press, 1980), written for Rae Armantrout when she left the Bay Area for San Diego in 1978. In this poem, Watten calls for the erasure of society’s “imperious frames”: “Could we have those trees cleared out of the way? / And the houses, volcanoes, empires?”

Watten’s call to dismantle inherited structures evokes Marx’s philosophical imperative for a “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” suggesting a poetic and cultural tabula rasa from which the world might be reimagined. “Mode Z” thus initiates a kind of permanent revolution, confronting entrenched personal and collective mythologies and urging a break from received narratives. Hejinian echoes this impulse in the seventh section of Lola the Interpreter, offering a bold refutation of rising American conservatism: Conceptual frameworks are not immutable. Drawing on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” she writes: “Are you grieving over the unleaving of the trees? They will fall.”

While Hejinian acknowledges profound grief over “the bigotry, the greed, the voluntary, willed stupidity, the passion for fascism” in today’s American conservative movement, she insists that sorrow must be transformed into critical engagement and imaginative resistance. Near the end of Lola the Interpreter, she returns to the theme of skepticism introduced in the opening section, and in a “precipitously disturbed” mood, she adopts an ambivalent stance: Skepticism may “KEEP YOU FREE,” but it can also lead to “hopelessness, impossibility,” offering “nothing but dead ends and fatigue.”

In the book’s closing moments, however, Hejinian strikes a more upbeat note, befitting the defiant utopianism that runs throughout her oeuvre. Drawing on Brad Giggs’s reading of Hume’s motivational skepticism, and writing in a present-tense voice reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s “continuous present,” Hejinian calls on readers to recommit to activist inquiry—to remain critically attuned, imaginatively open, and politically responsive, even in the face of despair: “Skepticism requires refocusing, repurposing, reconnaissance, resistance, utilizing thought’s ‘capacity to be mobilized toward different ends.’”

Lola the Interpreter exemplifies Hejinian’s “late style” in Edward Saïd’s sense of the term—a “mature subjectivity” marked not by passive decline or neat closure, but by “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” That Hejinian completed this formally daring and conceptually rich book while battling cancer speaks to her extraordinary resilience and creative force. Lola the Interpreter, in the end, is an affirmation and a continuation of Hejinian’s belief in language as a tool for reimagining the world.

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Archive of Desire

A Poem in Four Parts for C. P. Cavafy

Robin Coste Lewis
Alfred A. Knopf ($27)

by John Ngoc Nguyen

Robin Coste Lewis’s lustrous Archive of Desire hinges on a word it does not contain: “excuse.” The National Book Award–winning author’s third lyric performance opens with a handkerchief, an homage to that vital, charged piece of cloth from a poem of queer desire by C. P. Cavafy, “He Asked About the Quality.” In it, Cavafy’s speaker and a shopworker ostensibly make conversation about the handkerchiefs on display, “their only aim: the touching of their hands / over the handkerchiefs”—an excuse to do what is only natural.

Lewis revises these characters. Her autobiographical speaker stops by a clothing store, where skirts are on discount “(polyester, cheap),” and beholds the girl of her dreams on shift. Her “whispery voice breaking open // with desire,” the speaker pretends to be “looking // for embroidered handkerchiefs,” which she and the “shop-girl” go back and forth over, beneath their talk and burgeoning heat “a psalm of consent.”

In Lewis’s hands, the pocket-sized handkerchief experiences two sublime transformations. The speaker observes “a boat so casually navigating / the rough sea. // Its sail is / your unfolded, opened / handkerchief,” which is also, stanzas later, “a kite soaring // within my sky.” The handkerchief navigates land and water and air, not unlike the chorus Lewis summons: “We are the Goddess’s words— / Her bracelets, Her rings, // We are Her / intense and infinite wanderings.” As in her second book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Knopf, 2022), Lewis nods to the courage of ancestral, diasporic Blackness, adding her own precious stones, patiently cabochoned and faceted by her verse-thinking, to this begemmed birthright.

For all its epic making, Lewis’s book is about undoing, unlearning, being unapologetically unrepentant:

All the fallen
and broken
statues inside
my heart
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I am no longer afraid.
I will never again allow myself
to be afraid to be loved. Or to love you.

Cavafy, Lewis says in the lesbian bildungsroman that serves, too, as her epilogue, “was a god for Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, and all of that mixed together, for baby Queers . . . We were elegant in his lines.” She looks on her upbringing: formative was Ms. Paddington’s high-school debate class in Los Angeles. Wide open during lunch period, the classroom became a gathering place for “all the freaks, of which I was proudly one.”

Freakishness offers pain, pride, and—above all—humor, of which there is a trove in Lewis’s collection, an Ellisonian extravagance of laughter. “My father asked me one afternoon, affectionately and nonchalantly, ‘So, Baby, you a bulldagger?’ . . . And I laughed because he imbibed a word that was traditionally vulgar with such affection.” Lewis and her sister regularly accompanied their father to the garage, where he “constantly put tools in our hands . . . Soldering guns, the monkey wrench, tape measures, spackling.”

Lewis’s sweeping eye marries this “low” hardware with the “high” objects of her acropolis, which from the Greek translates to high city. A glass perfume bottle, small terra-cotta altars, the bones of a piglet, a hare-shaped baby rattle: these objects from the museum of Lewis’s acropolis, which doubles as a self-portrait, are “happily lost so that in the future—now—they can be regained. . . . Each of us broken, each of us emanating an earlier glory. A procession of winged selves parading constantly throughout our cells.”

These relics join the company of possessions from Lewis’s matriarchal family, her mother and grandmothers and aunts and female cousins, their “most gorgeous” bodies intimated by the garments and accessories they used as methods for beauty on earth: “Their handsewn frocks. Their holy rage. . . . Their rhinestone-studded pocketbooks and their mother-of-pearl pocketknives, the latter hidden inside the former—like their own interior weapons.” These last mementos call back to Cavafy’s vest pocket, where his handkerchief lies snug.

Lewis recasts Cavafy’s images via fragments and erasure in her lyric offering to the altar of multigenerational Blackness: an ebony divan, candles ticking off the years. Though the poet would “rather look / at things than speak // about them,” she describes them profoundly, her beloveds using “pearly combs to groom / our raven-black hair.”

Lewis’s poetics is balanced with the passion and play of youth, her development as artist, intellectual, lover. As a second grader, she was Cupid-struck for a peer, Bridget, whom Lewis, a precocious flirt and practitioner of mutual aid, would spare some change for lunch money. “Other girls had crushes on very cute but very stupid boys. Why should I not fall in love with the smartest person in Mrs. Larson’s class?”

Later, fleeing their racist public school system, a 16-year-old Lewis and her girlfriend would drive to Sisterhood Bookstore, their go-to: “It was here—among the ‘Sisterhood is Powerful!’ buttons, and the volumes of Our Bodies, Ourselves greeting us at the front door, as well as The Joy of Lesbian Sex (which made me blush hard), and Audre Lorde’s Zami—that I found a volume by the remarkable Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.” So marks the dawning of Lewis’s ardor.

To be a freak, to have membership in the freakdom, brings up Cavafy’s famous barbarians, so named by ethnocentrists of yore whose ideas are not unfamiliar, with Lewis writing her book against the backdrop of “my countrymen’s absurdity.” “[T]he barbarians? We are / their children.” Bestowing on each child the title of “Great ancestral palace,” Archive of Desire exalts “the little girls—all the brown little girls—whose bodies we buried in the Great Pit . . . the moment we looked to the horizon—the second we saw them coming,” in-groups and out-groups re-envisioned to indict power and its literally crushing notions of whiteness.

“The Earth and Sky still like to make love,” she writes. “They still give birth to giants.” Chiseling from life, history, and metaphysics another indelible work, Lewis is our lyric giantess.

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

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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Poetry Reviews

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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Poetry Reviews

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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Poetry Reviews