Seize, Brian Komei Dempster’s follow-up to Topaz, spares no one the highs and lows of fatherhood. The speaker struggles to care for his young and ailing child — a child whose many medical problems create an obstacle course of moral and emotional dilemmas. How does a father come to terms with the large and unknowable mysteries of a child who cannot communicate in a “normative” way? How does a parent — especially one who is dependent on language — guide a child without the use of speech? And how does one become the parent of another when their own uncertainties, their own wounds — intergenerationally from war, from strained race relations, from constantly being denied a place to belong — are still healing?

Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt’s So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. “Soon,” she says, “we’ll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow.” In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt’s speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling “in their sweat-resistant fabrics,” “so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time”; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers “no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare.” It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title’s idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable lives: look at this, she seems to command herself, “& look at how lucky I’ve been, for so long.”

About Andrea Cohen’s poems, Christian Wiman has said: “One is caught off guard by their cumulative force. This is work of great and sustained attention, true intelligence, and soul.” In The Sorrow Apartments, Cohen’s eighth collection, those signature gifts are front and center, along with sly humor, relentless economy, and the hairpin curves of gut-punch wisdom. How quickly Cohen takes us so far:
 
The Sorrow Apartments is home to spare and uncanny lyricism––as well as leaping narratives of mystery and loss and wonder. These poems race at once into the past and the possible. And yet, instead of holding things up to the light for a better view, Cohen lifts them to the dark and light, as in "Acapulco," where an unlikely companion points out, “as men tend to, / the stars comprising Orion’s belt — / as if it were the lustrous sparks and not / the leveling dark that connects us.” For a poet who has been called unfashionable from the get-go, unfashionable never looked so good.  

A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins’ oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience. These poems comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states. Blevins straddles various faultlines as a woman who writes and mothers, who emerges from a second divorce as an Appalachian transplant in New England, who sees from midlife the stringent but unspoken socioeconomic strata framing class conflict. If marriage “was a rope across a twilight abyss (an abscess),” if aging brings the hateful labels “OUT OF ORDER / & LATE FEE,” every disappointment uncovers rejuvenating clarity. “Bereavement status” engenders both heartbreak and hope, somehow, as “then you lose your losses.” Blevins triumphs in her reclamation of the spectacular in the mundane. “America is a flub. // A hack. A crime! America, fuck you for making // despondent bandits of us — / for blinding & hooding // & chaining & gagging us.” Even perched on shifting tectonic plates, Blevins wins the last word: “You don’t seem to know it, // but there are foxes / crossing meadows // out there fast as disco lights. There are loons on your lakes.” Amen.

In this stunning novel, Cynthia Cruz administers an IV drip of capitalist entropy that keeps us rapt: Steady Diet of Nothing compels readers to consume it in one headlong sitting. Charting the dissolution of an adolescent runaway community, the book follows a teenage girl, Candy, after her arrival at the Blue House — an abandoned home inhabited by other children seeking shelter from the world. Here, she falls in love with Toby, a boy from elsewhere whose companionship interrupts the perpetual alienation of the status quo. “He didn’t explain, but I knew,” Candy says. “I knew as soon as he’d started talking, that we’d come from the same place.”

Beyond their den’s walls, the market reigns, and the societal structure of infinite calculation and infinite exchange has rendered contemporary life meaningless. As Toby and Candy separately descend into drug addiction and prostitution, they find their efforts to defy the American economic superstructure futile, and Candy, again, is alone. “I’m going to die in here, I say, to no one.” The transcription of a mute prayer, Steady Diet of Nothing is a stark, vital work that requires our attention. “I’m awake or else I’m dreaming,” Candy narrates. “There’s a knock on the door. The phone rings forever but I can’t put the receiver down.” It keeps the line open as long as it can.
 

An intersection of jazz and the written word: poems to be experienced and felt

Sweetgum & Lightning lets us into an extraordinary poetic universe, shaped by a vernacular rooted in the language of self, one’s origins, and music. In poems that are deeply sensual in nature, Rodney Terich Leonard considers gender and sexuality, art, poverty, and community. Imagery expands through unexpected lexical associations and rumination on the function of language; words take on new meaning and specificity, and the music of language becomes tantamount to the denotations of words themselves. Through extensive webs of connotation, Leonard’s narratives achieve a sense of accuracy and intimacy. The nuanced lens of these poems is indicative of the honesty of expression at work in the collection—one that affirms the essentiality of perception to living and memory.