Born in 1936, Marge Piercy has made decisions that serve as scaffolding for her poetry and fiction. She has stayed actively true to her progressive, feminist convictions. She has returned, with depth, to Jewish traditions she was born into. She has maintained a complicated appreciation for the natural world, especially the environs of her Cape Cod home. She has remained in a long, loving marriage of encouraging equals, to Ira Wood, her sometime collaborator, and co-instructor when leading writing workshops. She’s also kept her sense of humor.

She harnesses worldly concerns with matters of the soul, with a straightforward beauty that provides many examples from The Hunger Moon—New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010. It is her eighteenth volume of poetry.

“The visitation,” from What Are Big Girls Made Of? weaves in and out of the moment, making it exquisitely current :

The yearling doe stands by the pile of salt
hay, nibbling and then strolls up the path.
Among the spring flowers she stands amazed,
hundreds of daffodils, forsythia,
the bright chalices of tulips, crimson,
golden, orange streaked with green, the wild tulips
opening like stars fallen on the ground.

This, and more, before Piercy makes her point with language that is as right to see and hear as the deer is both lovely and a symbol of rough reality :

Graceful among the rhododendrons, I know
what her skittish courage represents : she
is beautiful as those sub-Saharan children
with huge luminous brown eyes of star-
vation. A hard winter following a hurricane,
tangles of downed trees even the deer
cannot penetrate, a long slow spring
with the buds obdurate as pebbles,
too much building, so she comes to stand
in our garden, eyes flowering with wonder
under the incandescent buffet of the fruit
trees, this garden cafeteria she has walked
into to graze, from the lean late woods.

Never be misled by forthright declarations in a Piercy poem. Each reverberates music it was meant to sound, as in “Wellfleet Shabbat” from The Art Of Blessing the Day:

The hawk eye of the sun slowly shuts.
The breast of the bay is softly feathered
dove grey. The sky is barred like the sand
when the tide trickles out.
The great doors of Shabbat are swinging
open over the ocean, loosing the moon
floating up slow distorted vast, a copper
balloon just sailing free.
The wind slides over the waves, patting
them with its giant hand, and the sea
stretches its muscles in the deep,
purrs and rolls over.
The sweet beeswax candles flicker
and sigh, standing between the phlox
and the roast chicken. The wine shines
its red lantern of joy.
Here on this piney sandspit, the Shekhina
comes on the short strong wings of the seaside
sparrow raising her song and bringing
down the fresh clear night.

“Shekhina” represents devine, female spirit in Jewish life, making this and other poems in the collection, read like prayers one’s foremothers might have wished for, had they time, not to mention a loving spouse who no doubt helps with the meal so that all at the table can be lit by the “red lantern of joy.” Generations of Jewish women fought to learn the language and rituals reserved for men, making Wellfleet Shabbat and its neighbors in these pages a kind of altar of acknowledgement and remembrance, sacred bricks and mortar.

Love poems. Poems confronting war. Poems about cats. All are notoriously difficult to write without falling into dogmatic babble or trite traps. Piercy avoids this, in selection after selection, as in this from “Implications of one-plus one” from Available Light:

Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.

She suggests they’re still singing even after watching football together, deliciously possessing him and the game, announcing “Football is mine,” in “Football for dummies” a recent composition. The poem is pure fun, and you cheer for everyone.

“Peace in a Time of war,” quoted in part, makes my point about war poems and highlights Piercy’s versatility once more :

Ceremony is a moat we have
crossed into a moment’s
harmony as if the world paused –
but it doesn’t. What we must
do waits like coats tossed
on the bed for us to rise
from this warm table
put on again and go out.

And then there are the poems about cats. As someone who likes dogs and shares a bed with a man and one or more felines, I’ve written my share of terrible cat poems and am always on the prowl for good ones by others. In “Old cat crying,” as in all topics she seizes, Piercy is empathetically masterful, and in this case the mastery connects feline need to human need and loss :

He should not have died
before her. She cries
for him to come. She
sniffed his body and knew,
but she has forgotten
and he does not come.

Piercy apprehends what conventional wisdom sometimes disdains. We humans show emotion in ways, like sniffing (who among us has not sniffed a garment recalling scent of a long-gone love?) that can seem both feral and genuine.

Not surprisingly, for someone whose prose includes Sleeping With Cats, A Memoir, Piercy ends with a poem about the death of a cat. Like this entire collection, and like Breaking Camp, her first volume of poetry, published by Wesleyan in 1968, and well worth repeat visits, “End of days” engages the senses and enlarges them. Cats “see clearly/through hooded eyes, “we are informed, before being reminded how terrible it is to face the end of life while confined in “the silent scream of hospitals.”

Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue. Lesser poets, lesser citizens have been appointed United States Poet Laureate. It’s her turn.

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When we were in the mountains
We straddled a big fallen tree
I was so happy

I love these words! The poems sit sparse on the page, progressing as a tight narrative. I put Ms. Reyes in my cannon of love/lust poets like Deborah Landau and The Last Usable Hour, with her sexy wanderings through the city late at night, and Sandra Cisneros, whose Loose Woman makes me cry out for someone to spoon and swoon with.

Coeur De Lion’s beauty is in its sparse and tight language. There are few twists or clever turns of phrases, each line is hard flesh exposed for all its veins and glory. It’s in your mouth, and you will be satisfied with the finish:

My heart was beating
We went into the stall
And you slammed me against the wall
And everything was possible

The narrator and her lover/comrade are both writers. We live through their passion, their triangles and the circles of their small, close-knit literary worlds. Their story begins with holding hands in class and ends with borrowed books. It travels from the classroom to hotel rooms, and sadly, online, where words eventually kill the lovers.

The morning after
I definitively ruined
Our relationship
You wrote to me…

Fuck
You Ariana! For making believe,
For being too proud. For reading
Too deeply into words, so much
So that their meaning forms
Into nothing but your insecurities.

I feel the need to confess that I absolutely ruined a relationship in this very same manner. As a poet I read way too much into words, and my insecurities, while maybe not so visible on the surface, burn and rage down deep in me. I was with Ariana and her lover from the beginning to end. After the first reading of Coeur de Lion I opened a bottle of tequila and did shots in honor of Ariana Reines and the powerful magnetic pull of her naked pages filled with sex and bravery.

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Rob Griffith, in The Moon from Every Window, attempts many things at once, which isn’t surprising from a poetry collection. What surprises, though, is how well he accomplishes them. In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means not to know your own momentum and position at the same time, to never see the moon from every window.

In the first section, Griffith deals with domesticity, sharpening his poetry on everyday ideas. The collection opens with “The War at Home,” where a dog, “a boxer mix,” wages war on a springtime hydrangea by habitually using the bush as his toilet, but try as the dog may, he can’t win the war and kill the flower. What does this mean for the dog? For us, who may be trapped in similar wars at home that we will never win? Through the course of the section, Griffith explores a relationship falling apart. In Griffith’s world, we all become chained to monotony, even the undead. In “When the Zombies Come,” what is interesting is not that zombies descend; it is that the zombies quickly become us. The poem concludes:

I like to think they’ll mill and stare, then bend
to take up our uniforms, our jobs
and lives—a zombie checkout boy who sacks
the bread and eggs; the zombie line ref
who shambles downfield to make some bad calls;
and zombie teachers gurgling out declensions
for lie and lay. And at a desk, paused
with pen in hand, a zombie poet writes
a zombie sonnet for his sonnet love. He sings
of flawless gray skin, of eyes like curdled milk.

Here we see how Griffith shines. His exquisite verb choice (“mill,” “gurgling,” “paused,” “shambles”), his intriguing line endings (to pause on the word “pause” is at once obvious and effective), and his ability to make everything mundane (even a zombie invasion) show Griffith’s attention to language and the discipline of poetry.

The most notable and obvious evidence of his devotion to detail is his pervasive use of poetic forms. Like Natasha Trethewey in Native Guard, Griffith employs poems that adhere to forms at random, causing the reader to constantly ask, “Is this poem a form I don’t know?” Usually I am unimpressed by neo-formalism since form usually trumps content, but Griffith manages to utilize form without sacrificing what he has to say. “Heisenberg to His Wife” is a sonnet, “Patchwork Garden” is a haiku (and like all haikus, it is too short to be effective), and other poems show an impressive penchant for blank verse, as seen in this opening line from “For a Party at a Friend’s House,” “Not everything is elegy, thank God…” And this wordplay shows another of Griffith’s strengths: humor. Like the zombies, Griffith’s poetry does not take itself too seriously, even when it wanders into heavy physics.

The second section of the book focuses on two seemingly random and unrelated thinkers, Werner Heisenberg and Jonathan Edwards. In the first poem of the section, “Heisenberg’s Love Song,” Griffith begins with an epigraph from Heisenberg: “The momentum and position of a particle cannot / both be known at the same time. Knowing one will disrupt / knowing the other.” The section explores the idea of our inability to know where we are and where we are going. This builds off the collapsed domesticity of the first section. “Heisenberg’s Love Song” ends: “Are you moving toward me or away?” The final stanza of the second poem in the section, “Heisenberg to His Wife,” reads:

And nearly everywhere at once, it jumps
From state to state, absorbing and emitting
All those quanta—a light switch off or on,
No in-betweens. It’s here we are finally stumped.
Like love, the change is total, and I’ll admit,
The trouble lies in telling when it’s gone.

We cannot know our position and momentum, Griffith seems to say. Instead, as he declares in “Heisenberg in Old Age,”

each moment is simply a kind of waiting
for the next, a halfway house where no one leaves.
He wonders what it’s all for, a world
where the present is myth and nothing exists
but memory and anticipation.

Griffith, with all his deft wordplay and formal skills, is most impressive with his consistency to his poetic project. The Moon from Every Window meditates on the Heisenberg principle, that a particle’s momentum and position cannot both be known, and how it relates to people. By introducing the idea in the second section makes a reader rethink the first section, which is thrilling. With only a few exceptions, like “Ruth’s Alexandriad” which lacks impact, the poems in this collection succeed. The third section, with multiple poems about fishing, show a speaker on the move, either hitchhiking in Tennessee or finding his Chinese doppelgänger, showing a man now aware that where he is and where he is going cannot both be know, so he focuses only on where he is. The final lines in this strong, intriguing collection, in a poem called “Disappearing,” read: “…I’d just be gone, / like stars swallowed by the mackerel-light of dawn.”

Read “Disappearing,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Rob Griffith.

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What a collection! Marianne Boruch’s The Book of Hours is the work of a grown-up, full of gravity and understanding. These poems are sharp reflections, half caught before they’re gone. The words don’t always line up in sentences with conventional meanings, but at the same time, you know what Boruch is getting at, and her insights are worth the attention.

I’ll write a poem down whole–these are impossible to subdivide and get at the sense of them. Perhaps that’s high enough praise of a poet? She’s making things whole and smooth; chopping one up is like slicing into a raw egg.

Take a look at this one, called “To live in the bird guide, the yellowthroat’s”

To live in the bird guide, the yellowthroat’s
down thicket and hedgerow, like any
storybook would have it. And maybe his
witchety witchety witchety is love my life!

Times three. It could be steely: how dare you
and what do you know of migration
and ice. It’s the edge, prime happenstance
between woods and field, most ordinary

tangle of vine into brush. But his new
pause before each overdrive triplet
means some weather’s coming, weather
said secret, with a spike through it.

No. I’m bad weather closing in,
his silence tripped by my noise, my shade.
four seconds of threat. He’s at it again,
his fate to say nothing he says.

Like Wallace Stevens and his “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” this poem rolls around the yellowthroat, and you see why I couldn’t leave off any lines and still make any kind of point about it—as her phrases leave us off balance and looking around corners, “it’s the edge, prime happenstance/between woods and field, most ordinary” we wheel around the stand-off between the yellowthroat and the person—is it right to watch a bird survive for an aesthetic delight? The person’s shadow frightens the bird, even as she loves the bird’s life—and then, in the last line, a reminder how opaque the bird’s meanings and intentions are to the human mind.

Another poem, “In the crosshairs of mystery, they” juxtaposes the viscerally of death—one’s own personal death—beside the conventional phrases, the religion and the hospital IV.

Here it is, complete:

In the crosshairs of mystery, they
say to say: you can let go now (mother,
father, fill-in-the-blank). I know you’re only
holding on for us. Imagine. But imagine

the body. Imagine only half scenes and flashes,
decades of nothing between. You’re eighty,
in a diaper, everyone too nice, words
fast, too faint, making over the pretty flowers.

How many IVs? How much oxygen?
Our sitting there, our staring—she did let go of that,
the room, the cheap chairs, let go of Mondays, the guy
bringing the host to her from Mass, gravely aware

of his part in the drama, then someone else
entirely when no, she turned away.
Later, how to find her? I tried blurting out.
I tried letting go of the sentence, midsentence.

The poems jump into the air, twists around and land somewhere five feet away, you can see how impossible it would be to quote a line or two for purposes of review. These poems are sophisticated, mature works. I hope, in writing about them, that I don’t give the false impression that I’ve got to the bottom of what they have to offer. They’re often about the strange, complex and imperfect mapping of nature—human and wild—onto our 21st century lives. The nature Boruch has in her crosshairs; sometimes it’s the yellowthroat’s witchety witchety witchety, and sometimes it’s our own mystery.

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My kingdom for Dora Malech’s lexical agility! Say So is the second collection from this pedigreed poet, and it swings on elephant wings. By that I mean Malech manages to make nimble meaning out of our current crop of clichés by a variety of methods, whether that means mashing up figures of speech:

If I were an operation, I’d be fly by night
and very bloody. …
— “Face For Radio”

or applying a devastating twist to an aphorism:

The way to a man’s heart is through his ribcage.
— “Goodbye, I Love You”

or creating a slightly new aphorism that seems truer the more you think about it:

…Best
left unsaid: Oops. …
— “Note to So Sorry for Self

In our everyday language — which is so often blundering, clunky and obfuscatory — Malech finds, in her way, as much room for rejoicing as Whitman did. While the invocation of Whitman isn’t exactly right — Malech is more of a miniaturist (but then, next to Walt, isn’t everyone?), there is something about Malech’s reveling in the American demotic that is bound to draw comparisons to Walt (at least one, anyway), especially to his exuberance. Because Say So is exuberant, if subtler and more difficult than Leaves of Grass. Where Whitman’s lines are cataracts down cliffsides, Malech’s are levers in Rube Goldberg machines, each line activating the next one as the poem careens toward its end, one step ahead of the entire contraption’s collapse:

K.O. to my O.T. and bait to my switch, I crown
you one-trick pony to my one-horse town,
…
…Let me begin by saying if he hollers,
end with goes the weasel. In between,
cream filling. Get over it, meaning, the moon. …
…
My fruit bat, my gewgaw. You had me at no duh.
— From “Love Poem”

There is no solid footing here. Taking a tentative step onto “if he hollers,” we suddenly find ourselves at the other end of a different children’s rhyme, “goes the weasel”. As the line breaks, Malech seems to promise an explanation of how we got from “hollers” to “weasel” by telling us what came “[i]n between…”. Instead, we get “cream filling” — a figurative pie in the face.

That bit of prosodic slapstick is a Malech hallmark. She is often mordantly funny, as in this deadpan opening to a poem called “Inventing the Body”: “The lungs were my idea./Shins, his./Breasts, mine, though he agreed.” If I seem to be surveying Say So’s surfaces while dancing around the question of what these poems are about, well, I would argue (somewhat conveniently) that it’s unavoidable. For me, these poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. These poems explore the mind’s language leaks, its mission creep, by enacting them.

Earlier this year, Malech told “Bookworm” host Michael Silverblatt “Uh oh” hugs ‘ha ha’ uncomfortably close,” which is the pithiest explication of the double-sided nature of comedy I’ve ever heard.

Malech’s playfulness with language extends past the aural, as her jokes and near-miss puns can also often be visual, so much so that you can sometimes almost mistake them for typos.
For instance:

For his sake I steered clear or flicker,
singed the noodles, sang for supper —
— From “Relatively Long Arms”

or:

Now solve for x where mph is speed and oomph is impact
— From “Them’s Fighting Words”

or:

Here lies the sigh begun nine lines ago.
— From “Flight, Fight Or”

The title of this last poem is one of four which seem to be from Malech’s imaginary index of clichés, which includes “Forever Hold Your Peace, Speak Now Or”, “Break, Make Or”, and “Go, Touch And”.

Say So also includes a group of prose poems which, for my money, are not as strong as her more whimsical, rollicking, rickety lyrics. (Further disclosure: I once worked at ReDivider, the Emerson College-based journal in which two of the poems Malech collects here first appeared. However, as Nonfiction Editor I had no input into the poetry content.)

That’s not to say the prose poems aren’t often enjoyable. In fact, they contain some of Malech’s shiniest gems, such as “Past tense is too easy, turns tale vestigial only.” or the haunting “Yes, I cross my legs and bolt my door, read boys/girls as boys slash girls.” Those lines are from “Canzone: How To” and the volume-ending, really excellent “Body Language.” In other words, I would not want to have missed the prose poems in this book, I am just less likely to return to them.

Because this is a book to be returned to — to be sampled and enjoyed and mulled over. For all my enthusiasm for Malech’s magnificent wordplay, it can become overwhelming in one sitting, as you feel yourself pummeled by double- and triple-entendres.

“The words too whoseoever,” Beckett wrote in his late work Worstward Ho!. “What room for worse! How almost true they sometimes ring!” At her best, Malech reinvigorates some of those worn out words and idioms, making them ring just a little truer. In the process, she reminds us, in her words, of “[t]he privilege of language,/the privy and the ledge.”

Read “Thousands are gathered outside the interior ministry,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Dora Malech.

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In the poem “Phil–,” the speaker warns of the dangers of “focus[ing] on one thing / and mak[ing] it stand for every thing,” which is a good piece of advice for any reader of One Sleeps The Other Doesn’t, Jacqueline Waters long-awaited second book of poetry. The book, which is just over 100 pages long, consists of 14 poems–not including the poems-within-poem that appear in “Hello Due to Confusion: A Guard: II.” And while many of the poems are long, discursive, and paratactic, the book resists being easily summed up or captured in a brief blurb.

The poems often read as an extended conversation with one’s self, or perhaps with an other. In “Garden of Eden a College,” which was originally published as a chapbook from A Rest Press, the speaker claims, “my affairs / are just my questions,” and later in the poem a voice, perhaps the speaker’s inner-editor, parenthetically says, “These are all very good questions but stop / asking them.” And so there is a visible struggle in these poems–the reader gets to see the speaker thinking through ideas, expressing her doubts, and all the mess and contradictions that includes.

This is especially the case in “Garden of Eden a College,” where two characters, Jacqueline and Lampwick, appear and seem to be in a constant back-and-forth, tug-of-war, question-and-answer. Lampwick exists in opposition to Jacqueline and interrogates her. However, a strange slippage occurs in the back-and-forth and it can become unclear who is speaking. For example, “Lampwick this is not what you are looking for / or it is and you are totally embarrassed,” most likely should be read as Jacqueline addressing Lampwick; however, after so many of these exchanges and the strange way the characters constantly address each other by name, it is easy to begin reading it as one might a play, “Lampwick[:] [T]his is not…” Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to matter who is responsible for saying what, as the struggle between the two characters could easily be a struggle within a single, splintered self. This sort of shift in voice, or talking to or questioning one’s self, works well at the close of another long poem, “The Saw That Talked”:

How I can frame it aw I don’t know
cut-throat
Not that I feel that way
but that it appeals to me
to what
to feel that way

The “to what” in the penultimate line–the stutter, or hesitation, or interrupting voice–adds an interesting layer to the poem. Instead of the poem as monologue, we have the poem as dialogue.

Like “Garden of Eden a College” and “The Saw That Talked,” the poems throughout the collection easily lend themselves to multiple readings. The overall lack of punctuation can draw into question where one statement ends and a new one begins, and that is one of the pleasures of these poems. Another pleasure comes in the strangeness and playfulness in language, beginning with the weirdly wonderful enjambment of the book’s title. One poem is titled “Guard of an Eaten Collage: A Guard: I,” and the next poem is “The Garden of Eden a College.” “Garden of Eden” is preceded and followed by “guards,” which is explained in a fourth poem, “Somnambulism.” Written in two columns, “Somnambulism” reads like two separate pieces: one half reads like a performance piece that would fit alongside the imaginative blueprints for plays that appear in Jonathan Ball’s 2010 Coach House release, Clockfire; the other half reads as a straight-forward explanation for the poems that precede it:

I thought if my produc-
tions would not or could
not protect me, I could, at
the very least, protect my
productions. To protect
one production I imagined
especially vulnerable I pro-
duced other productions to
act as guards.

There are a number of lines that can be culled throughout the collection that speak to the act of writing itself, but if one were to draw too much attention to these statements, one would be in danger of focusing on one part and trying to make it represent the whole.

Throughout the book, the tone often comes across as flat or indifferent. In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” the speaker claims:

no emotion is pleasing!
each must be rejected
        replaced by an opposite
in turn rejected and replaced by yet another
strain of undifferentiated sentiment

There is also a sense of exhaustion: “Jackie I see / Lampwick I tire.” This exhaustion, or perhaps emotional remove, lends itself to wonderful descriptions that get at the strangeness of so many things people have accepted as normal in their lives. For example, “The Tax,” looks at relationships and the odd exchange of saying “I love you,” which “Begets an I LOVE YOU back, or it falters / As it its harbor / Fails to find.” And later, the poem looks at the structure of relationships:

…they are structures
These arrangements: living together
Sleeping alongside, staying awake while the other one sleeps. You have
To care! Be the sun
shining through a watery cloud, or the cloud
Creased to a white veil
Since where you believe you have power you don’t
And where you do you refuse to wield it

In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” “you” are instructed to reject your emotions until “you find your ways / have rearranged you slightly.” Although this rearrangement is not as extreme as Rimbaud’s idea of a complete derangement of the senses, Jacqueline Waters is definitely onto something here. This slight rearrangement results in unique descriptions and a worldview that gleans from a wide range of sources–from Jack Lemmon, to Apollinaire, to Linda Napolitano’s UFO abduction–however, the biggest source seems to be Waters own inner-self. This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel.

Read “Scissor Half,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Jacqueline Waters.

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What I noticed first about Nancy Kuhl’s chapbook Little Winter Theater was not just the emotional depth of the poems, but the lines themselves. Kuhl’s words build themselves into crescendo:

…the secrets aren’t
the interesting part the only part
tonight will be winter and we may
go under we may yet drown and here
in possibility’s dim and quavering
strike I would peel skin from knuckle
and wrist I would give jawbone
or eyelid or tongue

(“Echo’s Body”)

Perhaps I’m giving too much away too early, but I want you to watch with me how these poems build into fierceness; with Kuhl, there is no turning back. Little Winter Theater details a rough spot in a relationship. As readers we are given no other information but what is in the poems, no history of the relationship, no names, nothing to base a story upon. If Kuhl were to give us this information, the fire would go out of these poems. All we need pay attention to is what goes on while we’re in this room, this little theater, where we wait with the speaker for something to happen:

my suspended second story
tilts keen and madly swaying
wild a ship’s transom untethered

(“Fray”)

and

It might collapse at any moment, the room;
might come apart at the seams. Drifts in mist

in rain; wind shook everything, almost shook
everything loose.

(“Morning Provisional”)

We sit in an idling car with the speaker, receiving then later waiting for a text message
to appear on the phone:

…our momentary
messages collecting in phonelight
and the voice braids itself backward
a new silence pushes lexicon
to the brink

(“TXT”)

and later:

And O tiny phone, flat
and shining and still,

O won’t you?

(“Waiting, With Prayer”)

We watch as the partners return to one another and mirror each other in their desire:

…the way fingers
give up their secret in clumsy
silk unbuttonings now
I’ve forgotten what you said
about the echo chamber precision
of our speech because
the condition of this knowledge
is visual alone it’s between us

(“Language of Mirrors”)

The poem “Language of Mirrors” speaks to a theme that runs throughout the poems: the echo. In this poem, what happens between the two lovers will echo beyond this moment, and in other poems, word spoken echo as well: “echo speaks / first return returning refrain resounding / voice voice voice and oh how I listen” (“Echo’s Voice”). Further on, the echo becomes only words lost in desire –I want and I want more of everything / illuminated page tedious marks / the sender is only echo (“Network, Constellation”)—and starts to become lost entirely as “sound decaying within the ear” (“Grieving Narcissus”). With these echoes, these sounds, Kuhl leads us to a place where the speaker remembers speech and breath, desire falling among them:

your voice never wavered
same little words like a fist

to back like a hard fall the air
knocked out still wanting

regardless

and

the moment dark imagines itself
back in time at once this is

how the body understands mouth
and breath

(“Reckoning”)

These are poems that want to be breathless, that want to mirror the intensity of passion and desire and heartbreak, and leave the reader light-headed. Even when we sit still in a room or in a car, waiting, the words won’t let us be: words spoken, words texted, the multi-literacies of touch. These are poems that speak, that rush, but take your time with these poems. Read them slowly, no matter how much they want to speed. Pay attention to Kuhl’s use of the poetic line. These are poems to savor, to study, to bring to the space of our own lives.

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Albert Goldbarth is almost certainly a happy man. For most contemporary American poets, being accused of such as thing would be a slur. But Goldbarth still infuses his poems with an old-fashioned, childlike wonder at the marvels of our world, along with a bemused chuckle at the ways in which we so obviously fall short of our lofty goals.

In his new volume, Everyday People, Goldbarth intends for all of us to share those lofty goals. After 31 books, he continues to be driven by a devout curiosity about both the intellectual—he devotes poems to Darwin, Darwin’s wife Emma, Darwin’s contemporaries, 19th century German artist Adolph von Menzel, and English scientist Rupert Sheldrake among others—and the profane; in his expansive verse, we find cameo appearances by joint-smoking car mechanics, a divorcé who sleeps—like a feral animal—in the woods, even Rod Stewart. The bifurcated nature of his subjects and their bulk, their sometimes meandering line lengths, are all the distinguishing physical characteristics of a Goldbarth poem, yet he’s as much interested in metaphysics and cosmology as he is in alcoholism and infidelity (usually other people’s).

It might be easy to dismiss Goldbarth’s symphonic voice as predictable, as much a limited palette as the chamber pieces of Philip Levine’s blue collar lyrics. As Eric McHenry suggested in Slate almost a decade ago, Goldbarth resists the idea that lyricism is defined by an economy of language, in favor of a discursive and at times outright conversational mode. Whatever Goldbarth’s many pleasures, there’s an awareness too that the work itself is long-winded, exclamatory, even at times ranting. But his metaphoric control is so enviable, as in “The salmon drags across/the final miles of migration and it dwindles/in its task, like an eraser,” that his extended comparisons remain both artful and inevitably precise.

In “A Great Volume,” a four-page riff on Darwin’s interest in seaweed, Goldbarth wanders perhaps farthest afield, pausing to begin a new section of the poem with an almost prosaic transition, “One of those nights with good wine and companionship/where the high-minded bullshit accumulates.” It’s the perfect example of how Goldbarth uses levity to deflect the most frequent criticism of his work, that his poems don’t offer the intense and sustained control of those small lyrics. It’s an argument that he’s heard before, and not only is he aware of it, at first blush he appears to agree with the assertion. Take these lines from “A Story,” a poem that begins with an epigraph from Goldbarth’s late colleague Margaret Rabb.

…Even history
implies sequential happenstance—a story—although
we “know” this is in part our human need to read causation
into our serendipity-finds of homo erectus bones,
and the backroom plotting of timber and oil barons,
and the marriages and sunderings that mark dynastic lines
like the knows on a quipu, “I walked through the rubble
and glitz of the latter twentieth century, and I saw X,
which was flabbergastingly horrid, then Y, then Z,
these left me beaming out a living light
like an angel pricked with breathing holes.”

Indeed that poem may be the best synecdoche not only for Goldbarth’s work in this book, but for his career. He’s acknowledging that the catalog of metaphors in such highly referential poetry—including his own—can be overwhelming. After all, this is a man who called his most recent volume of selected poems The Kitchen Sink. Buried within “A Story” however is a poet with a confident worldview, one that manages a biting criticism of other, less ambitious contemporary work: the poetry of reportage has evolved to such a dominant state that its movements, even when they dissolve into finely wrought metaphor, are cliché. In essence, he’s written a type of poem that he never wants to write again.

If Goldbarth belongs to a school, he is surely its sole member; he’s not as interested in the colloquial as his contemporaries, those poets that Mark Halliday and David Graham label as purveyors of “ultra-talk,” and Goldbarth almost religiously shuns the ephemeral or deliberately obtuse qualities of what Stephen Burt calls “elliptical poetry.” Yet to discuss Goldbarth using expressed or implied comparisons to other poets is a poor choice. If metaphors about the Beatles have dominated popular music criticism for the past 45 years, then so too has the urge to define poets solely in terms of their antecedents and contemporaries. What’s more striking about Everyday People is that the catalog of proper nouns that populate the Goldbarthian poem never threaten to subsume the lives of the people who live there; “Our Heroine Ellen, and Three Pals” demonstrates Goldbarth’s prodigious gift, the ability to distill from all of that emotional Wagnerism a sense of empathy for each character he sees. Yes, he’s more interested in the other rather than the self, but Goldbarth wants to make sure that the reader sees us all as equals, including Short George, one of Ellen’s titular pals, who makes the following cameo:

At home tonight Short George is making up,
online, the rules and shoes and musics and peninsulas
of an entire cosmos. Why not? Someone hurt him
once, and here, he heals. Someone grabbed him
by the smitten-bone, grabbed him by the spigot
where the juice of infatuation enters the blood, and he was severely
pummeled, and never the same, but here he’s the master
of clouds and swords and fishing fleets and mass migrations
and here he can sorcer into existence a cure for the thing
that eats it way through Ellen’s shoulder and Keats’s lungs,
and here Short George can manfully declare his love for Dora,
which he’d never do in the bruises and blades of the “real world,”

Goldbarth prefers to write from his comfortable perspective, a voice that time and again pulls off the nearly impossible trick of being didactic and inviting both. It’s no accident that so many of his poems have at their center a pleasant and domestic scene, say drinking wine on a porch, or the dinner party from “A Great Volume.” Often, the voice conjures Goldbarth himself, doing the observational work of a poet: reading the Fortean Times, a magazine of strange phenomena, in a library chair, or eavesdropping on a public conversation. The openness of that voice, and our willingness to listen to it (sometimes at great length) is Goldbarth’s greatest accomplishment. He’s an intellectual omnivore, but his interpretation never comes at the expense of the reader’s own. He’s simply, along with David Kirby, one of our most generous working poets, and that generosity extends to a type of thank you found in the book’s concluding poem, which ends, “In my time I wrote this very thing./In your time you read it.” And that’s ultimately the idea that binds Everyday People, and Goldbarth’s oeuvre, together, that beyond reportage lies one more important fact: we did these things together.

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I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to be vulnerable. We just don’t do that. It’s not allowed. And that really, truly, made me sad. The idea is that you have to put away your inner turmoiled feelings and keep them to yourself in order to be the right kind of person. That disturbs me.

And that’s why the last book I loved was The Cow, a book of poetry by Ariana Reines. I loved how strongly the poems seem to run in the opposite direction of what we’re told is “good writing,” and good being-an-adult, for that matter. In an article she wrote about her book, Reines said that she wanted to “write poems that an educated person would feel embarrassed to read, poems that sound like Goth girls with feelings.” I think that’s kind of an awesome idea. There’s this opposing idea right now (or maybe always), that the sorts of emotions felt by teenage girls are not real emotions. They don’t count. In fact, we discount many expressions of emotion, ones that seem too strong, or too messy, or too lurid and cliché. If somebody writes about emotions in that way, we say it is bad writing. We cringe, we are embarrassed, we turn away from it. But why should we?

What’s so great about The Cow is that it is full of shit. Literally. It is full of grotesque, messy physical descriptions of the slaughtering of cows. It is also full of grotesque, messy descriptions of human bodies, and of human emotions. And it’s also beautifully and lyrically written. There’s a line in the poem “Rendered” that says, “Where is a living thing not itself. Is her shit any less her?” And guess what: women shit, and they sweat, and they smell bad, and they have emotions that are messy and uncomfortable. I know that’s part of being me. It’s part of what living is.

And here’s the thing: it’s ok for men to be physically gross. They can fart and they can be fat and hairy and it’s okay. Right now it’s not okay for women to do and be those things, but I think it could become okay. That’s because almost anything that is typically seen as masculine can be accepted and thought of as the correct mode for all people. It’s not the same for feminine things. I think we’re still a long way from accepting the messy, gross emotions that people have. And that’s because emotions belong to teenage girls. They’re feminine. They’re weak. We distrust them.

This probably matters to me so much right now because I’m struggling to become a writer myself, and to understand what that means, and how I should do it. And at the same time, I’m in a new city struggling with making new friends and learning how to get close to people all over again. I feel a little bit like my experience is negated by the vast pantheon of serious male authors whose works I’m making my way through. I’ve read a lot of current literature, and I like a lot of it, too. There are just some parts of myself that I don’t see there.

But in The Cow Reines pulls all of these rejected things back into the picture. We have to wallow in shit and wallow in feelings. It’s a gorgeous, sensual experience, meaning that you feel the poems in your body. Your senses are engaged. But it’s not pretty, and it’s not delicate. It’s feminine in a different way, in a dirty, honest way. It makes me want to make a new best friend. Somebody who can talk shit with me. Somebody I can show my vulnerable underbelly to, and maybe they’ll show me theirs back.

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First you have to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief interviews. But you don’t hear the questions and you don’t know who is doing the interviewing or why. It’s best, you explain, to think of it as a collection of short stories—and there are some plain old stories in there. But then you have to try to successfully relate what happens in the “plain old stories” about the poet and the kid on the high dive, which again, is not easy.

You might try saying something like, “There’s one story ‘The Depressed Person’ that amazed me, because it starts as this sympathetic portrait of someone struggling with the genuine misery of depression, but it slowly shifts until, before you know it you’re taking this pitiless look at the narcissism and selfishness of this person, and the self-serving, self-help jargon that enables her. And what’s really something is that in the end it manages to be both sympathetic and pitiless.” It might not work to follow that up by saying, even though you are impressed by it, “The other funny thing is, ‘The Depressed Person’ is one of the most annoying things I’ve ever read, but mostly because it’s so well written it’s like actually being in the room with a really annoying selfish person. Except for the sympathetic part. Which is sad in retrospect, knowing what the author struggled with.” That last bit will also require explanation, if they aren’t already aware, which prompts that face people tend to make when you suggest they might like an author who has committed suicide.

This may or may not be the best time to tell them that there are some very long footnotes.

You’ll want to tell them that Brief Interviews does in fact have some very straightforward stuff that goes beginning to middle to end, but even those can be pretty wildly experimental. Like the one about the insecure wife that starts normal but then breaks down into what seems like the draft of a script for a movie or TV show. Or the one about the painter, which is a crushingly sad story—but you don’t want to say why because it’s best to see it slowly take shape out of a softly-smudged and beautiful kind of impressionistic style that you never figured Wallace was capable of until you saw him master it. Try reassuring them that stories still get told, and that the book is not one of those things that people like to wave their hands and call “mental masturbation.” That’s when you realize, however, that maybe you shouldn’t be recommending the book to your co-worker or your wife’s friend knowing that it frequently mentions actual masturbation, as well as a variety of odd erotic behaviors, callous sexual and emotional manipulation, more than one instance of rape, vivid descriptions of bathroom activity and bodily fluids and something awful with a Jack Daniels bottle.

Note that if you mention all of that stuff it gets harder to explain how the book is actually very funny.

It’s probably best to stick to that point about “mental masturbation,” and explain that to “enjoy” this kind of experimental fiction—which can seem hostile to people who “just read for fun” and can feel like it’s just for cynical crowds who say you must not “get it” if you don’t like it—is actually to invert that cynicism. To be willing to have fun reading someone who wants to tell a story but is trying to do that in a new and interesting way. The trick is not to raise a cynicism against old fiction but to drop the cynicism to new fiction, and approach it with a sort of childlike wonder and joy.

If you get that far, though, you might add that the word “joy” is not one you would necessarily use to describe the book. Try explaining all this while wondering to yourself if you give David Foster Wallace a pass because it’s such, like, a thing to discuss his books and be seen reading them on the bus.

If you’re talking to the right person, you could point out that Brief Interviews is probably one of the greatest explorations of modern heterosexual gender interaction in American literature. If they’re not into that kind of stuff, try just saying that it’s basically two hundred and eighty pages on why the expression “man up” is utter bullshit and why those ads are so terrible. (Be careful if you’ve been drinking here. It could get out of hand.) Try explaining that even though the interviewed men are accurately “hideous” they aren’t that different from people you probably know. It’s more like how we are all pretty hideous on a daily basis. Make sure to say that they shouldn’t watch the movie first but should try it out afterward.

Try explaining it like this: “If you don’t read it, you will never read anything else like it.” Try explaining what a gift that is. That might work.

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