And while many of Meitner’s meditations are brutal and anxiety-laced, what’s also clear is this collection believes firmly in the power of goodness. The world is dangerous, but not all hope is lost: It can be immeasurably beautiful, too.
How indeed can we know any better than to pretend in our cultural discourse that the past is past, that sexual violence is over and done with for survivors? Eilbert offers an alternative, holding open the wound by concretizing the spaces left by trauma and the shape a telling makes around the traumatic act.
Hillman plays with the post-human—a hypothetical, ecological state following the extinction of humanity—but never abandons political activism and poetic optimism.
There is magic in the poetry of Rocket Fantastic. Bodies are gendered and more-than-gendered. Humans are also creatures, most often a buck or a doe, who live and play amid other creatures of the wild.
Minnis notes that the “book was inspired by classic movies and couldn’t have been written without the Turner Classic Movie channel,” and the book indeed sounds more like a classic movie, specifically classic film noir, than any book of poetry I can think of.
In many ways, this is a nostalgic book—looking back and recalling old friends and scenes from childhood—but when Chambers hits the note he’s reaching for, readers are left in awe. In “Pin,” a poem in which the speaker reflects on the year his sister broke her arm, the piece ends with the two siblings dressed up
Even at the level of syntax, words and concepts flow into one another. The poems are fluid and absorptive.
In the precision and beauty of its varied form, Timothy O’Keefe’s You Are the Phenomenology is, among other things, a triumph of confinement.
Only a few pages in, it’s clear that this is not what one could reasonably expect from Coach House—or, for that matter, from any broadly conceived constellation of contemporary experimental poetry.
Moseley does not just consider the boundary between outside and inside. Her poems also explore divisions between dream life and reality, animals and humans, belief and doubt, bizarre encounters and everyday events.