In 1964, Brodsky was a poet accused of “parasitism” and his subsequent trial propelled him to infamy. He made articulate cases for his personal dignity, for his right to be left alone to create art, and ultimately wound up doing two years of hard labor in the northern village of Norenskaya. In 1972 he was exiled—and in ‘87 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Four years later, he was the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Jump forward to modern-day Russia with its mutated capitalism, its images of a bare-chested Putin riding horses like Conan the Barbarian, its intensely apathetic and disgruntled youth. The same way that the Soviet era gave birth to a poet like Brodsky, who argued for the freedom to simply be a poet, the Putin era has given birth to a poet like Medvedev, who argues for uncompromised honesty, both from himself and his contemporaries.

In his 2004 essay, “My Fascism,” he writes: “Everyone has his or her own fascism. My fascism is the fatal inability to understand and accept anything falling outside not only ‘humanity,’ but my own personal humanity; it’s my attempt to hang on to various ghosts instead of admitting that though we’re still filled with the shards of the old culture, we’re standing now on bare ground.”

Medvedev is a true 21st-Century poet. He has renounced all copyright to his poems and most of his writing is published directly to his website, where anyone can access it and republish it, if they so choose. He has claimed, rightly, that arguments over poetry do not spill over into real life and are therefore irrelevant. He does not believe in contracts and encourages piracy of his own work. He is intensely critical of the poet who seeks to differentiate their public art and private life. Most importantly, he lives his life by his own standards and actively criticizes those he finds hypocritical.

It’s No Good, then, is a collection that screams its own importance. It is simultaneously a book of arguments and pleas, a book of great beauty and horrendous ugliness, a level-headed comprehension of why things are the way they are and a tight-fist of destructive anger.

Of the poems included here are the first Medvedev had published, the collection It’s No Good, as well as selections from his second collection, Incursion. Among the later selections is the long poem “Europe”—Medvedev’s final published poem before he renounced the literary world—and it’s a real standout. Here’s an excerpt:

I see that all tourists
are like these sick people,
I think of what one can do in such situations,
one should anticipate them
the real
the impossible

the never-happened
journey, and not look at real ruins
with lizards crawling on them
not drag one’s already
dying body (one’s weak, ill-formed or alternately well-formed and
slightly foreign body)
through these pleasant evening cities

Four translators collaborated on It’s No Good, including publisher and n+1 editor Keith Gessen. Their efforts are magnificent, especially considering Medvedev’s idiosyncratic use of punctuation and capitalization and deeply embedded historical and cultural references (footnotes give invaluable context for those of us who aren’t up-to-speed on contemporary Russian issues.) The variety of forms are sequenced nicely to keep the reading experience feeling fresh. A lengthy essay may lead into a brief manifesto, followed by a self-contained body of poems. Eventually a greater vision becomes apparent. Medvedev is using his poetry and essay writing interchangeably; he is dictating his actions—and going out and living them—as a living art project.

It’s particularly fascinating to see Medvedev’s embrace of technology shift through It’s No Good. From published collections to Livejournal to using his own personal website, it’s clear that Medvedev not only believes in what poets are saying with their words, but also that there is meaning to be found in both how and why those words are delivered to readers.

Perhaps no excerpt makes that intention more clear than this one, taken from Medvedev’s cycle “Love, Freedom, Honesty, Solidarity, Democracy, Totalitarianism:”

for a long time I wanted
no one to know about me,
and then I wanted
everyone to know about my anonymity
and for everyone to understand this as
their punishment;

Related Posts:

• Messages by Piotr Gwiazda
• “50 American Plays” by Matthew and Michael Dickman
• Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
• Enigma and Light, by David Mutschleener
• Blizzard Over Bosphorous

Say it with me now: ether. Say it again and again. What does it mean? In my mind, it conjures images of air, galaxies of stars; I see the way the sky pales to new colors as the black of outer-space pushes in, all around us.

Piotr Gwiazda’s most recent collection of poems, Messages, opens with a quote from Joe Milutis’s book, Ether: The Nothing that Connects Everything—and it’s this subtitle that hints at how we should read the following pages—which goes, in part, “…everyone should have an inalienable right to illusion, or at least a responsibility toward illusion.” It’s a fascinating way to begin a book, permission to create and to construct an understanding for the reader: a message.

The first poem of the collection, perhaps not surprisingly, is entitled “Ether.” In it, Gwiazda writes:

And it is up to the poet
to translate, i.e. to say:
“You think this is a movie,
But it isn’t a movie.”
“You think this is freedom,
but it’s a Chinese toy.”

The poet is a hacker
(is art information?),
a spoiler of the tyrant’s feast,
a disturber of the public peace,
a traveler on the red-eye,
an assassin in the boardroom.

Many of the poems in Messages concern themselves with “the poet,” his or her role in modern society, their nature. It becomes clear that Gwiazda believes poets bear responsibility to process the world around them, to reflect and refract light, and in turn, they bear the burden of expectation, the obligation to beam outward some purified newness. Take, for example, these lines from the poem “Removable Tattoos:”

Every six months you are required to change
your email password and/or sexual partner.
You fell asleep one sunny afternoon
and woke up in a driving hailstorm.

All is not lost, however, when poets—
tired of contests, fed up with manifestos—
improvise in softly toned sprechstimme
songs of dubious importance and vague beauty.

Gwiazda’s poems are political in the sense that a person is political by nature of their very being. In organizing Messages into three distinct sections, Gwiazda is giving shape to this idea. The first section explores the notion of “the poet.” Toward the end of this section, Gwiazda slips in a sly quote from Nabokov—“time is a prison”—before devoting the entire second section to a long poem entitled “Time.”

Messages of intent can be detected throughout “Time.” Some of them are self-aware: “For months I’ve been working on / a poem called ‘Time.’ / Will it stand the test of time?” Or, “This poem amounts to, at best / a conversation with myself.” Others feel instructive: “Don’t be fooled / by complexity: / What seems to you complex / may be in fact quite simple.” Or, “I never feel the same way twice. / I struggle to make my mark. / I write for myself or strangers.” If, as Nabokov says, time is a prison, than “Time” is Gwiazda struggling with the prison of his poetic ambitions.

The final section of the book is perhaps the most fully realized, the product of the ideas and concepts introduced in parts one and two. Here Gwiazda portrays his America, uncovering the very substance of life, that indefinable connection between what we understand with our senses and the way we process that information internally. Take, for example, these lines from “Island:”

So unlike our slick American cities—New York, Baltimore, Wichita—
with their haphazard rebirths, different kinds of trees,
pedestrians navigating among traffic lights and closed sidewalks
in January rush, knowing that only being the best matters
and losing is no fun, that life gives no second chance,
no refund, no exchange. Plan your future. Dress for success.

For those interested in the poetic process, the alchemy of creation, Messages is a weighty, thought-provoking read. It won’t make itself obvious after a quick read—as the best books refuse to do—but over time, like repeating words in the dark, a new and better understanding will inevitably emerge.

Related Posts:

• It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev
• “50 American Plays” by Matthew and Michael Dickman
• Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
• Enigma and Light, by David Mutschleener
• Blizzard Over Bosphorous

Matthew and Michael Dickman’s 50 American Plays does an admirable job of capturing some of that excitement: excitement of exploration, of wonder. The poems that make up this collection are formatted as tight, typically page-long plays. They are heavy on personification and symbolism, surreal effect and humor. Stage instructions, if they are given at all, are limited to a handful of words. The title is slightly misleading, however, as there are actually 52 pieces in the collection—the brothers Dickman included both Guam and Puerto Rico. They are organized alphabetically. American entertainment icons such as Duke Ellington, Walt Disney, Bruce Springsteen, and Judy Garland make appearances.

The book doesn’t take itself too seriously, although its best moments occur when it does take itself seriously, and the end result is a mostly fun, loose romp through wild territory. But I can’t help but wonder why. Why format these poems as plays?

Reading the acknowledgements page at the beginning of the book, I learned that six years ago, a staged reading of 50 American Plays was hosted by Provincetown Theater. I have absolutely no way of judging how well this staging went, but much like the collection I’m reviewing here, I’m guessing it was hit-or-miss.

Some of these poems are lovely in their own right. Take, for example, “People Retire to Arizona for Lots of Reasons.” The stage directions are given as “Sunsets and deserts.” A clipped exchange between “An Old Man” and “An Old Woman” reveals a poem of great beauty and precision, where the silvery image of swinging golf clubs take on the delicate form of an angel’s wings. Then there’s the poem “The Coldest Weather in Indiana,” which includes the following lines, recited by “Snow:”

Draped like lace
Between the fencepost
And the sky
I spend all my time
Thinking of
Disappearing
Thinking of water
Of churches
And drowning

This is some powerful stuff—poems that dig deep and immediate into the very soul of a
state’s “character,” or the imagery that powers deeply embedded stereotypes, an understanding of qualities on a general level.

The problem is that a fair percentage of the poems that make up 50 American Plays come off as exercises in cleverness. These are often the shortest poems in the collection, so they’re easily forgiven, but still, they feel phoned-in and self-satisfied.

Here’s the entirety of “Missing You in Missouri:”

(A train station).

ME.

I miss you

(A train passes by).

It’s worth mentioning that Kenneth Koch seems to travel through the states in this collection as a sort of guiding meta-spirit, always in connection with the shadow of Hamlet. Here he is directing the play in Hawaii (“You don’t see your father/You/Feel your father”), playing Ophelia in Iowa, designing sets in Minnesota, portraying the tortured prince himself in Nevada. The reason for these appearances stems from one of the two epigraphs opening the collection, written by Koch’s great contemporary, John Ashbery: “In all plays, even Hamlet, the scenery is the best part.” It’s no surprise then that some of the strongest pieces in 50 American Plays are the most inconspicuous, lamentations from A Bus Stop or A Closed Door.

The second epigram comes from the final lines of D.H. Lawrence’s poem “The Evening Land.” “’These States!’ as Whitman said, whatever he meant.” As frustrating, sad and silly as some of these hybrid play-poems may be, the brothers Dickman have dared to pick up where Whitman left off, exploring inside that confounding exclamation. What we’re left with as readers is at least as ugly and surprising as the country that serves as so much inspiration.

Related Posts:

• It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev
• Messages by Piotr Gwiazda
• Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
• Enigma and Light, by David Mutschleener
• Blizzard Over Bosphorous

All that being said, Feng Sun Chen’s debut full-length poetry collection Butcher’s Tree is a strange book. It’s the kind of book that gives a descriptive word like “strange” some core muscle, some hidden teeth. It’s the kind of book I’d imagine coming across in the library of sunken, ghost-ridden submarine, stranded at the bottom of the ocean, a library filled with damp and algae-clung books. Maybe with a giant squid for a librarian, a giant squid who can talk and who knows your name. Or maybe you’d find it mixed in with a stack of centuries-old leather-bound children’s books, astounded and a little repulsed by its complexity and darkness.

Take the omniscience and time-weary voice of myths, add in the best parts of fables, namely the anthropomorphic language and the supernatural weirdness, ground it in some extremely compelling poetry, and you’re still nowhere near what’s happening in this book. Butcher’s Tree seems to exist in its own dimension—a not-entirely-unfamiliar dimension. It’s familiar in the way things like myths and fables are familiar but it’s twisted into something unrecognizable, like finding an insect in your dirty clothes, but when you look at it up close you see that it has too many legs and a human face.

Take, for example, the poem, “Hades:”

One day the girl dived
to go pearl harvesting
and was never heard of again.
Perhaps the water was too thick
for her cries to reach shore.
Perhaps she is still
there, in a cave, laden
with pearls, rich with light waiting
to hatch out,
her hands cupping thousands
of pale eyeballs.

There’s certainly something familiar about the way this poem unfolds, something comfortable, almost boring. “One day the girl dived…” “…was never heard of again.” But by the time we get to those final, unsettling lines, the poem is in some weird new flux, “…rich light waiting/to hatch out…” “…thousands/ of pale eyeballs.”

Hades, of course, is a name familiar to mythology. And Chen’s poem seems to be telling an origin story of sorts, yet in a way that de-familiarizes the reader, a skewing of some innate trust. This de- familiarization of subject matter, storytelling, personal confession, and references to classic literature is where the book ultimately gets much of its unique strangeness, that word-power that’s so often fleeting. Like this excerpt from “Groceries:” “My god is so small that I have swallowed him. And that was how Eve got her Adam’s apple.”

Or these lines from “Prometheus:”

My livers could fill whole oceans, several planets worth.
Meaningless livers. Endless livers.

I can’t say it. The word is ripped from me daily.
I have become a huge liver. A liver of it.

Many poems in this book have titles that directly reference the stories whose magic we have passed down through generations, childhood games, or traditions. “Fountain of Youth,” “Duck Duck Goose,” “Story I Heard While in Bed,” “Quest.” It’s a nice touch that gives the collection a unifying quality.

The final third of the collection is comprised of a sequence of poems entitled “Grendel is a Woman,” which begins with the lines “Grendel is really a woman. He and his mother are one entity.” It’s a marvel, a reconstruction of myth. “He cleaved his body, every stroke. This must be/what it is like to be born, he thought, skin raw with himself.” Chen’s forcefulness if feral here, purposeful, and the book concludes on a pretty magnificent high. There’s nothing else quite like this out there.

Or, as Chen writes in her poem “Epistle:” “Anything is permissible as long/as it is explosive.”

Related Posts:

• It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev
• Messages by Piotr Gwiazda
• “50 American Plays” by Matthew and Michael Dickman
• Enigma and Light, by David Mutschleener
• Blizzard Over Bosphorous

The revelatory poem, simply titled “Gertrude Stein / Agnes Martin,” begins with a wonderfully succinct description of Martin’s abstract painting “Milk River.” As the poem unfolds over the next few pages, an astounding level of depth is gradually revealed. Nothing feels forced. Each line is minimalist, interspersed with quotes taken from Stein’s The Making of Americans. We read that Martin makes grids to “graph/nothing—,” that “Along the stream of lights are nodal points,/each a ‘radiant gist,’/a ‘patterened event.’” And then, the six lines that gave me my click:

Martin’s marks are Stein’s
word stipplings,
both inter-patterning one another

as they could not
without the clear dileneation—
each word girded by the grid.

Like following a stream of lights to a nodal point, I’d arrived at an understanding: this book was something different.

In an author’s statement included with my copy of Mutschlecner’s book, he writes that “seeking the inherent similarity in dissimilars is…the highest goal of poetry.” The question then becomes, what can be revealed in the overlap between works across mediums? It’s a fascinating jumping-off point, the chemical reaction of creative and interpretive overlap. Or how shadow play in a dark room can reveal previously unseen horrors alongside purely incandescent haloes, solely depending on the angle of light. Enigma and Light is made up of pairings, mostly between visual artists and philosophers, thinkers and poets, each seeking that inherent similarity in dissimilars.

Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound, Thomas Aquinas and Emily Dickinson, Robert Duncan and Dante Alighieri—these are only a few of the pairings Mutschlecner explores in his poems, often arriving at wildly varied forms. For instance, the pairing between German theologian Karl Rahner and the Dusky Seaside Sparrow (taxidermied in this case) results in a uniformly formatted and lyrical poem. Whereas the pairing between Thomas Aquinas and Emily Dickinson has much more esoteric results. Or how both the form and language found in the pairing between abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell and Charles Olson feels wild and playful. There’s a lifetime’s worth of learning on display in this book, the inner-workings of a poet’s education and discipline exposed and decoded. Reading through this book is itself an act of exploration. After all, it is within these new spaces, opened up through intertextuality, that the author is able to explore his self.

Mutschlecner has a real gift for combining imagery, language, and thematics inherent in his subjects. Just take a look at this excerpt from “Georges Rouault / Robert Motherwell.”

The face, the refrain
of the face. Francis Bacon
gave us

an igneous
or metamorphic
metaphor:

the eyes
boil up, the mouth
smears

under heat and pressure.
In the geologic
history of painting.

The poem takes on a new significance when you take into consideration the fact that Rouault burned 300 of his paintings at the end of his life. And yet even without knowledge of the artist’s self-destruction, Mutschlecner’s language, his tightly drawn rhythm and sonic repetition made this particularly effective for me. I felt compelled to learn more, to further explore. Whatever the highest goal of poetry might be, the idea of inspiring further learning in the reader is certainly a high-water mark. Poetry is too often private in its profundity, a whisper to oneself, or a scream in an echo chamber. And with that in mind, what Mutschlecner has accomplished here is all the more impressive.

At the end of the book is the two-part “Enigma and Light in Every Relation”—the best approximation of what Mutschlecner set out to accomplish. Using quotes and references from the Bible, Mutschlecner seemingly discovers the roots of his creative evolution. “Light streams across the bowl of the valley/into the high horizon’s peak./I found myself inside a prayer.” It’s fitting that this final poem should be a pairing of the author himself with the very thoughts that fuel meaning in his life, with the very beliefs that demonstrate the beauty so readily apparent in all things.

It becomes that much more powerful, to come to understand that what we see so often precludes some other vision. This is the true nature of peering into the unknown, those dark spaces of self-discovery. Or, as Mutschlecner writes toward the end of Enigma and Light, “The Priest focuses on the crucifix at the far end of the church/that no one else can see;/everyone else looks at the one above and behind the altar, a crucifix/the priest, as he consecrates, can’t see.”

Related Posts:

• It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev
• Messages by Piotr Gwiazda
• “50 American Plays” by Matthew and Michael Dickman
• Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
• Blizzard Over Bosphorous

For Josh Reilly, the main character and narrator of Geoff Hyatt’s uniformly excellent coming-of-age novel, Birch Hills at World’s End, Erik is strength and independence. He doesn’t give a shit about what people think of him. He talks back to the kids in letterman jackets who make fun of his hair, his black clothes. And he isn’t afraid to throw a punch in a fight. But when Erik starts to fall in with a group of low-rent meth dealers, and when his talk about acquiring a handgun starts getting a little too serious, Josh has to question how much he actually knows about his best friend, how much of the writing in his “Doomsday Book” is violent fantasy or real-life plans waiting to be set in motion.

Birch Hills at World’s End takes place “between Detroit and nowhere” in the year 1999, when something called Y2K was rumored to have a SkyNET-like effect on humanity. As someone who spent the first 18 years of his life in Western Michigan, who weathered the unbearable winters in conjunction with the chilliness of its conservative politics, who found solace in hard-talking friends, fast cars, cigarettes and heavy metal, I can say firsthand that this book gets all of the details just right. These kids aren’t dumb; they’re not unruly. They’re just fed up with the drive-thru-church culture of the post-industrial Michigan wasteland. They see their peers dropping out of college, coming home and taking dead-end jobs, getting hooked on pills and diving headfirst into oblivion. And it scares them. This is clearly a world that Hyatt knows well. There is real care on display for the characters in this story, for the nuanced feelings Josh feels for Lindsay Kruthers, a beautiful, self-mutilating goth whose army-surplus bag has the words “KILL YOURSELF, NOW” written on it. This is the high-school novel that makes all of the other high-school novels look painfully ironic, silly and out-of-touch.

I wish there were more books like this one, I really do. It was painful to read in the same way that flipping through an old yearbook is painful. But the way the events of this book pan out, the perspective awarded to kids like Josh who are smart enough to question everything and everyone around them, made me appreciate my own life that much more. I knew kids just like Erik. There was even a little bit of Erik inside me. And I still got out.

There’s hope yet.

Related Posts:

• It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev
• Messages by Piotr Gwiazda
• “50 American Plays” by Matthew and Michael Dickman
• Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
• Enigma and Light, by David Mutschleener

When I was in college, I took a couple different Russian literature courses—covering both contemporary and classic novels. They were all taught by the same man: a born-and-raised Muscovite, a man who had witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union. He’d take us out drinking after class. And at the bar, loosened up by booze and the kind of excitement that comes from discussing Platonov four hours in a row, he’d vaguely discuss the books of poetry he’d published in Russia before immigrating to the States. They sounded beautiful: architecturally structured, lyrical. But none of his students had ever seen these books. They’d never been translated, he said. Why not? we’d ask. Because, he said, it is impossible.

He explained to us that the Russian language is, and these are his words, “six times more expressive” than English. If the poems he penned in his native tongue were to be shoehorned into the graceless confines of our blunt language, it would destroy all of their beauty. They would mean nothing, he said. He seemed both proud and saddened by this—emotions that echoed the characters in the novels he taught.

So how do I approach the task of reviewing a book of poems written in Russian? The answer is that I can’t—not really. Critically, I’m out of my depth no matter how much research I do, how much Russian literature and poetry I study. And after reading A Fire-Proof Box, a collection of poems by Novaya Yunost’s poetry editor, Gleb Shulpyakov, the best I can do is say that the translation, performed by Christopher Mattison, feels very much alive in its flexing of language, neither shoehorned nor graceless. A Fire-Proof Box is a porous work, languages overlapped, breathing, an English translation that manages to capture the icy weight of classically “Russian” sensibilities.

Take, for example, this excerpt from the book’s first section, “Flick:”

A quiet little village with a mournful puddle
in its square, where the tyrant’s monument
stretches his arms towards a better world
though this better world is no longer affordable,

in an ancient little town, with the tolling of cans
and plaster rustling in the wind—
“What are you, prima?”—“No, Doña Ana,
widowed on the stage.”

The deceased, fitted in boots, carried
down the street with feet pointing to paradise:
“Listen, do you believe in omens?”
“I believe, but don’t really understand them…”

In his introduction to A Fire-Proof Box, poet Evgeny Rein writes of what Brodsky termed “slow reading.” He elaborates: “I believe what he meant was that an increased degree of attention—compared to other forms of art—is required of the poetic text.” There is a real ease to Shulpyakov’s poems, and so the temptation to skim over their surface is constantly looming, at the line break, the page break. A quick reading would only serve to detract from the rich detail on display. Just look at the shimmering imagery and textural descriptors of the following excerpt, from the collection of poems, “Acorn:”

a damp flag on a great wall,
blizzard over bosphorous and sea vessels
wail in the dark like gypsies,—
a golden bracelet from the sea floor
stolen in a harborside dive
jangles somewhere in the silence
among turbans gone white from the snow
as if praying for souls that will never sleep
in this marble grove of etched tulips

But carefully chosen images and beautifully rendered gleam are only half of what makes A Fire-Proof Box a rewarding read. There is a continuum at work here. In the poems that make up this book, one finds many allusions to great artists. There are writers, painters, composers. Pushkin, Blok, Kafka, Cezanne, Vermeer, Shostakovich.

In the book’s centerpiece, “Cherries,” Shulpyakov’s narrative stand-in details a summer spent in a dacha outside of Moscow, the pained consciousness of working on a play beneath the ever-present shadow of Chekov.

That summer at the dacha I wrote a play
(it was another’s, not my idea
to write a play; a theater
had commissioned a drama from another life).
Something from the classical genre: love and the seaside.
And a pistol must be feared near the finale.

The pistol of Shulpyakov’s poem misfires—and this feels pre-determined in the way that history, in retrospect, feels pre-determined. I’m reminded of military leaders ordering their troops into battle, all the while knowing it is a lost cause. And yet the courage remains. The knowledge that the decisions we make are the right decisions. A Fire-Proof Box is a serious book of poetry—and I mean that in the most complimentary way. Its gravity never felt lost on me, despite the intimidating nature of the Russian language. This is a book for readers who love to read—for attentive readers—and those who don’t shy away from the bitter taste of cherries.

Related Posts:

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• Messages by Piotr Gwiazda
• “50 American Plays” by Matthew and Michael Dickman
• Selected Translations by W. S. Merwin
• Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen

Every once in a while, when our schedules permit, my girlfriend and I trek Upstate, or out to New Jersey, and make the rounds of estate sales. I like to think of it as treasure hunting. I’ve wound up in soggy, crumbling Victorians packed wall-to-wall with sex toys and pornography, or low-key ranches filled with breathtaking original art. The point is that you never know what you’re going to find. That’s what makes the whole thing exciting.

In one instance, in a basement lined with padlocked steel doors and rusty, obsolete machinery, I uncovered a phonebook-thick stack of papers, rubber-banded tightly and stained with water damage. After removing the rubber bands, flipping through some of the papers, it quickly became clear that I was audience to the home owner’s life story. Here was a copy of their immigration forms, their proof of citizenship and medical school transcript and licensing application from some Eastern European country. Years of this person’s life unfolded in my hands, page after page. They received an award for their dedication to helping others, sold and bought property, made carbon copies of their correspondence to their peers, and then, abruptly, I had reached the last page. There was nothing else to tell.

Reading David Wolach’s Occultations, his 2010 poetry collection released by Black Radish Books, brought back that day in that musty basement with those water-damage pages in the best way possible. Rarely has a book of poetry offered such total, and carefully constructed immersion.

In Wolach’s work, scraps of text float uneasily atop scanned images of confidential documents, inky, Xerox-quality images hover throughout the book like omens. About halfway through the book, we’re given a hand-drawn diagram, seemingly explaining the text’s placement on the page, scribbled notes connected with arrows that say things like “feed back loop,” or “Windows of what? Or For?”

Wolach layers text upon text, smudging lines with strikethroughs, gray boxes, as if he were self- consciously presenting his process alongside the work. It’s occasionally muddled and confusing, but more often thrilling—chipping away at some sense of authorial identity, these pictures of ear lobes, nipples, windows—filters clogged with dead skin and shed hair. Wolach writes, “as if we ever made a name, it was the, later they, later still, it. how abstraction drowns a river, how oxygen needs be said just once more for oxygen to become its opposite.” In the crowded, junked-up space of Occultations, text can’t exist without imposing its very body upon the space of some other—and often what’s being hidden speaks volumes.

The main text is broken up into six sections with titles like “modular arterial cacophony” and “body maps and distraction zones.” Each section has its own distinctive feel, form and tone. The writing therein is both highly technical—a blurb on the back cover name-checks a slew of poetic techniques such as “procedural interference” and “affiliative appropriation”—and playfully inventive. For example:

Our lacquered surfaces stand nose
To nose, we made this feed
Back loop, now this feed
Loops back, our words catch
In the wire mesh

This is the kind of book that I was comfortable writing in. After finishing it for the first time, I went back through with a pen in hand, marking up nearly every page, drawing arrows of my own, looking for answers, working to uncover the covered parts. I bracketed chunks of text that seemed to contain what I was looking for: “we collect like coughs on glass, stains, your mouth runs to the pane with furious. breath to [wipe off] breath. [a preferred] breath. with thumb and. compulsion. what orgy. fragile stains. whose.” Or, my favorite: “paper organs altering shoreline after shoreline after up to the [sick] smell of a rope-burned neck. thankful, dying, spent.”

The real standout of Occultations is its “body maps and distraction zones.” Here, everything that Wolach has worked so hard to destroy construct for us is on display in full force. Each “Distraction Zone” begins with a brief explanation, much like an obstruction, for example, “…written while watching 1) online homemade pornography (no audio), and 2) surgical imaging stills of the inside of my urinary tract. Oscillating between viewing (1) and (2), 30 second intervals.” The ensuing poem, entitled “(muted domestic pornography)” is all the more effective because we understand its context, the fact that it filtered through like an ooze:

Tensing with a perverting here
Here the sheen of a slowly open

Curve a depth I’ve seen this before
Before I roamed corporate clinics

My holes are a constant testing
Ground perpetual breaks of strata

Occultations is a fascinating—if not totally accessible—book. After reading through it a handful of times, it remains elusive in my memory, like so much of life’s light. I was reminded of the moments in the car, driving home after reading those documents in the basement of that estate sale, wondering what happened to that man, why his belongings were being thumbed through by strangers, or if those pages, those words that erected a life before my eyes, just became more fuel for the ever-working stoker. And I was relieved, so many months later, to read one of the epigraphs in this strange book, a quote from the Buddha, which says “everything is burning.”

There is comfort in that, I think. Maybe hiding.

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The poems in Noelle Kocot’s fifth book of poetry, The Bigger World, telescope seamlessly from small, unexpected wonders, to the largest impossibilities—always hinting backward and, depending on the point of view, magnifying something seemingly unimportant, or merely hinting at something huge just out of reach, something never articulated, only felt.

Composed of “character poems,” or miniature narratives that encapsulate everything from a lifelong relationship to the sudden weightiness of dread, The Bigger World tells a bigger story by focusing on the smallest moments, such as Pandora, looking at herself in the mirror before releasing the terrors of her box unto the world. “She was dangerous, / And when she looked in / The mirror, her eyes sparkled / With I’ll kill you.” It’s a familiar moment in any person’s day—a flash of hatred, directed inward—a flash that often goes unsaid, buried beneath the folds of details, in the name of carrying on.

There’s a reason why myths are passed down from generation to generation—they’re easy to relate to, elastic in their timelessness. They teach lessons. And that myth-making voice is very much alive in Kocot’s poems, employing clear, unadorned language. It’s easy to be lulled into a suspension of disbelief, to actively take part in the world-building of these people, these characters.

In, “On Becoming a Person,” Kocot writes, “But Bruno decided that he could live / Without his self. And so they parted. / When they did, Bruno saw his / Self off in a taxi without headlights. / His self wobbled like a rocking horse / In the cab. Bruno felt an indescribable / Happiness, and went on to save / The world from its self, happy to be / Of service, sad for the miles he had / To go before he slept and slept again.”

The horror of watching the self separate from the self—the schism of self-awareness—it’s almost vertigo-inducing. Kocot’s gift as a poet is being able to explain such complexity with such uncompromised frankness. Her sentences are crafted around the organic sounds of speech, and so it’s easy to get swept up in the flux of it all, to read over the best moments to be found in this collection. Often, I had to go back and re-read whole passages just to let everything sink in.

Kocot’s poems are often filled with surprising twists of logic—small gifts of unexpected behavior that can be both funny and sad. In “Homage,” we’re told that “Rick liked to hunt wild mushrooms / in the starlight.” And then later, with the same matter-of-fact flatness, we read that “Rick traversed many lands, / And he also traversed the red / Acres of language in the form / Of many books.” These flourishes of language—often alarming in their placement within the poem—are a real joy to come across.

There are plenty of references to “the world” throughout the book, reminders of this thing that tethers bodies together with its gravity. In “Welcome Mat,” we’re introduced to George, for whom “The whole world clanked like / An iron shovel.” As the collection progresses, quickly cohering into some sort of whole, we’re given a sense of Kocot’s larger vision. Sometimes the bigger world is that tiny hint of feeling we keep buried deep down inside, that killer smile we flash ourselves in the mirror each morning. Earlier, I used the word “telescope” to describe how Kocot’s poems shift their attention from the micro to the macro. Perhaps the best example of this “telescoping” effect is “Daniel.”

Told in short, declarative statements, “Daniel” unfolds its beauty in seemingly disconnected increments. “He loved the way her hair / Curled in the rain,” Kocot writes. And then, “He loved the sun, / The way a cat loves the sun. He loved the ruins of old / People ambling down the street. / He loved. And lost. And / Loved again.” These are nice sentiments, if not shallow, sliding over the surface of something. And so it’s that much more powerful when the poem finds full impact with its final lines: “He / Kept away from edges, / Soothed himself to sleep. / He loved the fall, loved to / Rake leaves in the fall.” It’s instructive in the way we’re inviting to revisit the poem’s opening lines and it’s hard not to be impressed by how well Kocot pulls all the poem’s disparate elements—love, loss—into an image that’s nearly heartbreaking in its melancholy.

The first time I finished The Bigger World, I had to put it aside on my desk and try to forget about it—I was so moved by its charm, its humor, its unrelenting sadness, that I couldn’t bear to think about it. But then, nearly a week later, I felt myself being drawn back in, moving from poem to poem the way I might hold my gaze over old photographs in a scrapbook. I was reminded of where I was when I first found out a close friend had died, the way my heart pounded when I realized I was in love, the gross sweetness of decay in the fall air. Some of those moments in my life were small moments. Some were indicative of something bigger. I could explain them to you and then you’d understand.

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The term “Horror Vacui” has two definitions, both of which serve as a useful framework while skirting the abyss hinted at throughout Heise’s alternately gloomy and beautiful poems. 1) In art, the term references the fear of empty spaces, also known as “cenophobia.” For me, the idea conjures images of illuminated manuscripts, their surfaces obsessively scrawled with endless intersecting lines and images, inexhaustible detail. Or Bosch, his terrible garden. And, 2) In physics, it’s the theory that empty spaces attempt to suck in gas of liquids to avoid being empty.

It’s this second definition that I find most intriguing, because I’ve spent my entire life avoiding emptiness, fearing it, even. I fill myself with books, with language, thoughts and ideas. I fill myself, like so many people do, with the company of others.

And so what happens when that company departs?

In 26 poems–with lines that span the width of the page, blacking out the blank, broken by cadenced backslashes, bunches of brackets–Heise explores the yawning void opened in the wake of his father’s death, an attempt to fill himself with something, with those things that make us human: memories, flashes of teeth lit up red in the hissing flame of a match, images of dead and bloated dogs, the love we allow ourselves to feel, to remember, when we’re tired of our loneliness.

Life is messy. We obsess over its details, the overlap, the lulls in our calendars. And there’s always been something so cathartic about holding a collection of poetry, something so calibrated, collected, and letting that precision seep into the everyday. Heise’s book is a beautiful reminder, of sorts, that there is order to be found, to be constructed; it’s a reminder that there’s sense to be made out of the swirls of chaos.

And so I keep returning.

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