Smirou takes the possessive pride of appropriation, or rather, personalization, of a historical figure: in this case Florentine Lorenzo de Medici, an Italian statesman and de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic during the Italian Renaissance: a magnate, diplomat, politician and patron of scholars, artists, and poets, most notably Botticelli and Michelangelo.

However, The New Testament is not entirely a poetry of witness, either. Made all the more vital by the violence and racial tensions we see daily on the evening news, Brown’s poems position him somewhere between recorder and controller.

Within its catalogs of the miscellaneous world, the book finds a cataloging of an observer always in danger of being swept away by things observed.

Associating “poetry” with “nothing” may seem to beckon after the rueful poet’s reduced expectation that, because poetry makes nothing happen, there is, in fact, nothing to defend.

Make no mistake: these poems are dazzling, bruised, brilliant.

While Conoley’s poetic virtuosity might accept the world and marvel at it, that’s not to say that some poems aren’t exasperated with the injustice of the world.

While Beautiful Soul’s oscillation between fiction and metafiction can seem somewhat slow footed, the rich sonic textures of The Barons produces a dynamic friction that simultaneously accompanies the poems’ semantic content.