For all the open sincerity it’s meant to imply, when one begins a statement with the caveat “to be frank,” rest assured that what follows is bound to land somewhere between unsettling and vitriolic. Speaking frankly isn’t something we’re all that comfortable doing, precisely because it forces us out of the comfort of complacent non-engagement. As both a poet and an activist, or more poignantly in his refusal to make a distinction between the two, CAConrad continually speaks up, speaks out, and speaks frankly, forcing a re-evaluation of culturally pervasive notions about what constitutes normative gender, sexuality, and domesticity. But The Book of Frank is not a polemic, exactly; rather, in a mode reminiscent of John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Conrad’s sequence of untitled, short poems catalogs via the character of Frank the aftermath of the archetypal events of life: birth, childhood, independence, sexual awaking, marriage, parenting, and death. These events are not narrated as much as given an absurdist, allegorical spin—part Kafka, part Jungian imagery, but always clearly articulated. This allows the immediate shock of their sometimes-nightmarish situations (waking with revolvers in one’s hands, eating from a tampon, a wall covered in sores, several miscarried fetuses kept on display in jars, etc.) to transform into a biting and parabolic critique of the assumptions we’ve inherited about familial interactions. At once charming and frightening, The Book of Frank will certainly take the top of your head off, and it might just replace it with something better.

—Noah Eli Gordon

When looking at the latest book from a writer who has been publishing poems for the past half-century, the initial impulse is to forge some summation of the entire career. But Wisława Szymborska’s poems in Here refuse to stand in for the life’s work. Instead, each seems to be stamped with its own time; as its concluding poem begins, “In fact every poem / might be called ‘Moment.’” The poems in Here are to be read as discrete moments in the poet’s experience, in which the 87-year-old Szymborska shows a humor and an attention to the temporal and tangible that is undiminished by advanced age. The title poem dwells in the physical world, where “we manufacture chairs and sorrows, / scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins.” And later in the same poem, “There may be comparable places elsewhere, / but no one thinks they’re beautiful.” What we have is what we make, which is also all we know. Szymborska anticipates the skeptical reader—“I know, I know what you’re thinking. / Nothing here can last”—but things will last, the poet assures us, at least as long as we will them to. The poems are haunted by visitations: the figure of memory, the personification of an idea, the poet as a teenager, an imagined meeting across time with a long-gone Polish poet. Szymborska, as much spiritual medium as mediator, gives her visitors a stage. The virtue of Here is that the present seems infinite. No wonder, then, that the book closes with a colon, the promise of more to come.

—Elisabeth Divis

“Stationed fast to parentheses of sleep and winter,” this debut collection probes the emotion of the (nearly) motionless. The poems are chilled to the bone by a repetitive, immedicable loss reckoned obsessively in the box-shaped stanzas of four poems called “Motel,” in which “We have made a confederacy of meanwhile.” In the long poem “From the Lost Diary of Anna Anderson,” the anonymity of the motel becomes that of the insane asylum. Like the woman who is not the murdered Russian princess, yet who nonetheless recalls her suffering in startling detail—“my sisters tacked jewels into the linings of their petticoats . . . A. screaming / her muffled face in a cushion running from the men”—nobody is anybody in these frozen poems, and nothing belongs, so that, in the final line of “Dead Letter Office,” “What did you keep” is no longer a question. It took me three reads to appreciate the strange litanies of Titus’s verse; their insistent rhythms feel eerily constant despite the formal variety that meets the eye, and the poems are ritualistically precise as they inventory what’s gone missing and what remains. In her lists, the mechanical rubs up against the purportedly animate: power plants, “one bowl of orange root & fennel,” “a mechanism / of spool and hinge” (the heart). Here is lyric brackish with nouns, in which the forlorn “I” struggles to the surface, and the question seems to be whether there is anyone, or anything, capable of feeling adequately—a familiar predicament, rendered here acutely on our deadened pulses.

—Amelia Klein

When comes the flood, who gets on the boat? Every beast and bird and creeping thing, kind after kind. This assumes that the captain has the means and the mind to sort. A bird or beast appears in almost every poem in L.S. Klatt’s Cloud of Ink, but the poet has serious doubts as to whether man can make adequate or accurate sense of his inheritance. In “Liquefaction,” the speaker finds an octopus in the snow: “And not knowing what it was or why it was there, I gutted it / as if a hunter.” The consequence of hunting, with none of the deliberation. And the confusion doesn’t belong to the speaker alone: “So many mistook my passion for gangrene.” Things quickly take an even sharper turn into the surreal, as they frequently do in Klatt’s poems. However, while meaning is elusive, it is not cryptic. In “The Pear as Wild Boar,” the hunter replaces fauna with flora, with no appreciable change in ritual or consequence: the speaker “comes upon the wounded pear / & puts fingers to neck // &, feeling / the pace of its breath, slits its throat.” Klatt’s terraria and aquaria don’t surrender their secrets so much as defeat the very idea of them. Cloud of Ink has a naturalist’s descriptive power and sense of wonder, but it’s true wisdom is Klatt’s reticence in the face of partial understanding. He notes that “the horse like a hearse / is patient.” More shepherd than hunter, more sailor than captain, Klatt shares that virtue.

—Raymond McDaniel

Every so often an actor or musician decides to publish a book of poetry— Alicia Keys, Charlie Sheen; singer-songwriter Jewel sold a million copies of her effort, A Night Without Armor. But unlike the other vanity collections, longtime character actress Grace Zabriskie’s Poems is an authentic and spirited book, rooted in her New Orleans upbringing and in the same Los Angeles that brought us Charles Bukowski. Fans of the actress won’t be surprised that many of her poems tackle gritty subject matter, and she has a knack for building, without exploiting, a harrowing scene. She also has a sharp sense of humor. “Joan,” Zabriskie writes in “Queen of the Waste Stream,” “the ways I have felt about garbage / up until now, are, in chronological order: // 1. No way at all, really. Nothing.” At about 140 pages and covering the entirety of her 30-year writing career, Poems most definitely would have benefited from more judicious editing (perhaps we don’t need the entirety of Zabriskie’s writing career), but the poems that succeed do so on their own strange merits and not simply because they glitter with Hollywood fairy dust. “What they want is the top of you. Skin. / The look and the / way and the lay of the land of you, in / little / boxes,” Zabriskie writes, tackling from an insider’s perspective what it feels like to do what she does for a living.

—Lynn Melnick