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.

A crucial component of the book’s success involves the meticulous balance Deming constructs between disarray and order, which holds a mirror to the goings-on of the world: yes, the headlines are clear, but how did we get here?

It’s like hearing out your friend who needs to tell you about that ex who cascades across his or her memory, about how the sky disintegrates the longer you stare at it, and how one’s relation to truth can only be measured by their proximity to pain.

Her rhymes are multifarious and carry out wildly different operations. They have been compared to those of Browning for their occasional boldness and performative insincerity.

Debora Kuan’s wonderful Lunch Portraits inverts and subverts this ideology of hunger, constructing poems that deploy tongue-in-cheek surrealist absurdity, biting social satire, and lyrical longing, revealing the psychological consequences of our pervasive “terror and loathing” of female hunger and sexuality.