For Clevidence, the world is not too much with us; we ourselves are simply too much. The spasmodic leap of life made into the human was all out of proportion—consciousness was just an extended error message.

The move, of course, is a standard one within left-oriented postcolonial poetics, letting oppressed languages and peoples ostensibly speak back to or disrupt official discourse.

Most successfully, fractured syntax, lush imagery, and the implicit silence of spatial interruption create pleasurable verbal texture and complicate the events of the poems.

Malech’s constraints are a departure from her earlier work, but she also uses the page to great effect, a tool she hasn’t used much previously. Poems sprawl into white space readily, gaps opening up between words, allowing the tight structures more room to breathe.

From this rich literal and figurative vein, Peterson mines the many forms of interchange—cultural, economic, familial, linguistic, political, sexual—that color our lives as individuals and as members of clans, couples, marriages, nation-states and workplaces. Each relationship mints its own form of currency, these poems suggest, and an individual must reconcile the value she brings to each with the value ascribed to her contributions by others.

One of the great pleasures of reading across Keelan’s body of work is seeing how these concerns and images evolve over time. Even as her formal concerns change, Keelan continues to return to the literal heart, defamiliarizing it each time to give our own a jolt.