Emporium, the darkly genial debut collection from London native Ian Pindar, exhibits a variety befitting its title and its author’s range as a critic, editor, and translator. Luring the reader in with deceptive informality, these poems delight in surprises, not always happy: “Youth and beauty have left me / a full packet of cigarettes / and this balcony.” Though some poems feel limited by the effervescence of jokes—to be cracked only so many times before losing their fizz—others, such as the grisly “Advice for Travellers” or the tale of hapless Big Bumperton, sustain rereading with their tremulous unease. Subtle sound patterning, including unobtrusive rhyme, adds a vocal dimension, as does astute parody of worn-out speech: “I don’t recall the last time / we met. I think it was in Berlin.” In many poems, Pindar the ironist and satirist becomes a gadfly, sometimes displacing exhortation into dramatic utterances (for instance, ventriloquizing ancient Indian materialist philosophy). At other times, apparently speaking in his own voice, Pindar displays keen timing in both the comedic and historical senses: “every royal wedding is a funeral / for democracy.” If these poems tend to burst like bubbles, they delight, before doing so, with their livid iridescence. Pindar’s inventiveness and sense of linguistic and literary history make this an enjoyable collection, holding promise for the future.

—Paul Franz

When a poem is written in the second person, it’s almost inevitable that readers will point to themselves and ask, “Who, me?” That “you” might simply point back at the poem’s author or speaker, but it can refer just as easily to everyone, the population at large. In rare instances, the “you” actually refers to someone on the other end of the line. Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, a collaboration between G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher, is not quite epistolary. While each poet sometimes riffs on images or words from the other (the text doesn’t identify who wrote what), the two are more concerned with establishing a consistent or collective register: “We like it this way, as the room is reflected, and us with it, / but more vibrantly, crisper, so that everything / takes on a pleasing shape we’ve risen to fill.” That gentle valediction is the most recent example of contemporary work that struggles to express the exhaustion of excess; any one of the poems in this lengthy book adequately catalogues the contents of souls too burdened for certainty. Its real strength, however, comes from how two voices speak to, past, and about each other, the burden of their present literally shared and manifest as acute, if sometimes surreal, attention: “It’s your birthday, after all. / You unwrap the package / only to feel / the texture of real skin / against your skin.” The standing presumption that whatever we are reading is occasioned by—and intended for—another person does invite a certain tenderness. Even though Waldrep and Gallaher create a closed conversational loop, its effect is one of welcome.

—Raymond McDaniel

“Isn’t it all— / the before and after of every gesture—remotely elegant?” Rob Schlegel asks midway through one brief, image-centered lyric in The Lesser Fields. Transition and transience govern the obsessions in this first collection: the shift from life to death, the passage of time and season. Most of the poems here present a kind of field in themselves, directing a passage through objects and tight-bound images for the reader. The effect is syntactically sinuous, at times dislocating, but also rhapsodic: “Tonight, her name is a leaf covering / my left eye. The right I close / for the wind to stitch shut with the thread // from the dress she wore into the grave / where the determined roots of the tree / are making a braid around her body.” The book’s three sections (“The Lesser Fields,” “November Deaths,” and “Lives”) allow the poet a range within his largely pastoral focus. Even when presenting a stark mortality, he retains the gorgeous heft of his language. Schlegel’s poetics turn on the evocative power of certain words, a belief in their specific alchemy: “He set out to find / A poultice of red stones in the pond— / Its cool republic of dead leaves.” Braced against the winter austerity of many of these “fields,” the effect is one of powerfully wrought language, and of a mind that looks for sturdy unions between speech and environment. Throughout, Schlegel performs these acts with consciousness and aplomb: he acknowledges, “I am in the world, but / With pauses.”

—Jay Deshpande

Christian Hawkey’s latest and arguably best book, Ventrakl, is a ghost story—not in the flashlight-under-the-face, seated-around-the-campfire sense, but rather in the hauntological, Derridean one. “Books—of the living or the dead—” Hawkey writes, “are the truest ghosts among us, the immaterial made material.” Hawkey takes a multi-generic approach in Ventrakl not merely to translate the Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl but to reanimate Trakl’s life and work, resulting in a collection that is part biography, part explication, part scrapbook, part photo album, part personal essay, and entirely “redoubled by the erotics of collaboration and translation.” Intimacy, grief, political despair, and personal dialogue propel this project. Hawkey incorporates the details of Trakl’s life—his fondness for brothels, his possibly incestuous relationship with his younger sister, his cocaine addiction, his schizophrenia, and his eventual suicide—into his own prose fragments, nocturnes, centos, lists, and conversations. Ghostly traces and apparitions abound, but the most disturbing specter is that of “an experience of pure powerlessness as a citizen, a citizen within a so-called democracy.” Hawkey converses with Trakl after attending one of “the largest world-wide anti-war protests in the history of civilization,” which he knows can “have absolutely no effect,” and Trakl helps him understand: “You stepped into the gaze of the State and thereby gave it a choice: to pretend to incorporate your resistance, or ignore it.” Less hopeless than this exchange might seem, though, is Trakl’s advice, “Discover a resistance you didn’t know existed, that has no perceptible name,” and then “Disappear with it.”

—Kathleen Rooney

Michele Glazer’s third book approaches ideas of death through a compelling and carefully considered lyricism. Take “In the lava tube,” whose speaker grows attuned to the slippage of all things into the past while descending into a volcanic cave. “What stays with us?” she asks after her companion charges into the dark without looking back “when his fingers drop / down a hole the light he carries.” While another poet might find consolation for loss in flights of imagination, in “Trace” Glazer confides that “the place imagined / is the place felt,” but “something down there rattles you.” Glazer is adept at striking statements of feeling and fact (“the ocean is a world of things / eating each other”), but her scrupulous passages of description, particularly of acts of perception and misperception, are her most distinctive and unforgettable (two hand-caught hummingbirds are described as “crazed suns”). Journeys by boat (or ferry) figure throughout the book, as in “That Would Be Whidbey”: “I came for something. . . . There is only one way to get there: / departure.” What Glazer departs toward most is “the fraught blossom” of memory (“Trace is the scar / itself and the finger tip moving / over the scar’s lip”), compelled by the need to formulate its material into sense, into a poem: “Debris seeks its natural angle of repose.” Intent on making something beyond “decay’s sweet roughages,” in the remarkable title poem the book finds its central metaphor: artist Leopold Blaschka’s glass flowers, which “make perfection / the object of the object.”

—Sean Patrick Hill