The title tells us that this is a book about being half: “Half donkey and half human being,” as the poem “Mulatto” says in its first line, half “the song // Which unrelated to the body pass- / es through the body”—and half “love / In the body for the body love and love” (“Continuing”). With an unerring sense of music, in rhythms as insistent and ungraspable as a recurring dream, McCrae’s poems approximate the sound of the subconscious, of what the mind does with words when it isn’t using them intentionally but murmuring to itself consolingly and censoriously of its own imperfectly recorded history. To be half, to be a mule, is to be neither one nor the other, neither here nor there. This motif repeats itself through the idioms of marriage, parenthood, autism, Alzheimer’s, and finally the pursuit of faith, which is for this poet—as for George Herbert, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who constitute one current of McCrae’s poetic lineage—the pursuit of lyric. In the book’s final movement, the poet, now in the wake of his marriage, stands naked before his god in a sequence of poems that returns to lyric’s origins in prayer, conjuring the divinity his soul requires: “Lord of the hopeless also dear Hat-Soaked / Pole-In-The-Canal and Red-Tie Father.” Yet no phrase better captures McCrae’s ability to startle lyric’s most timeworn materials back to life than this one from “Crows”: “spring the trees / Are raw with birds.” When you read something that sounds so simply true, everything, including poetry, seems possible again.

—Amelia Klein

The English word “engulf” usually refers to ingesting, swallowing up, yet can also (when passive or reflexive) mean disgorging, as a river into the sea. While this secondary sense captures the primary meaning of Anja Utler’s original münden, the translator’s deeper discovery (one of many in this volume) is precisely the term’s volatile complementarity. Object and subject, matter and language, fear and desire: these familiar distinctions become—in these heavily enjambed, syntactically fractured, yet sonically taut lines—freshly permeable. Drawing on her training in speech therapy as much as her studies of Slavic and English literatures, Utler’s language continually unweaves itself into abstraction that it braids back into the sensory, whether in the natural history of the first half of the volume or its mythological re-imagining in the second, where Marsyas, the flayed satyr, and Daphne, transformed into a laurel, demarcate the apparent extremes of exposure and incorporation. Throughout, in a fitting twist, Beals’s confident translation recovers the spirit that Utler so closely identifies with the letter, subtly reconfiguring German syntax into an English that preserves both her connotative richness and the underlying scenes to which it is tangent. A striking work in English, this translation provides a superb introduction to an exciting young German-language poet of rare linguistic and imaginative inventiveness and power.

—Paul Franz

Each phrase in Strata, Ewa Chrusciel’s remarkable sequence of prose poems, can be experienced as a moment of rapid transition. Chrusciel deploys the kind of verbal juxtapositions that have become familiar to readers of contemporary American poetry, but she does so with unusual insistence, articulating the experiential shifts of a finely tuned, many-layered mind. “Whenever we visited, my grandfather would put his chair on the road and wait,” Chrusciel writes. “Kraina na Bosaka. We were the apparition of deer. Pray, why chase each stalk of wounded light?” Throughout Strata, phrases themselves become like deer that appear to disappear on the margin, sense fluttering in what Wallace Stevens called its “ghostlier demarcations.” Also at play is the force of Chrusciel’s Polish—not only in occasional Polish phrases, but in a radical, dislocating impulse that seems to move from the Polish meaning of “strata,” i.e., “loss,” into the English sense of “layers.” Chrusciel’s moments of transition, marking the passage of time, become the indices of both what is lost and what accretes. Charles Sanders Peirce, writing from an Emersonian perspective, notes, “It is the compulsion, the absolute constraint upon us to think otherwise than we have been thinking that constitutes experience.” Perhaps what is most noteworthy about Chrusciel’s beautiful poetry is the way it constitutes the reader’s experience, how it makes us feel the force in what we may not yet be thinking.

—Tony Brinkley

Heather Christle’s first collection, The Difficult Farm, marks the arrival of a powerful voice in younger American poetry. Gallows humor and a fascination with barnyard and other animals provide the collection with a light, whimsical tone that suits its dreamlike subject matter: “When I arrived at the motel room / the bear was already there, shivering, / because of the air conditioner / which we could not control.” Christle’s poems often reject conventional, received values and voice distrust in, or disregard for, technology, history, and medicine: “I love systems,” she writes, “like the weather, / and I love to adopt them on Monday and by Thursday / have renounced them altogether.” The poems in The Difficult Farm, like many of Christle’s peers’, are driven by free association rather than logical narrative, with transitions between thoughts and images often blurring together expressively. What distinguishes Christle’s work is her penchant for setting up our expectations and then dashing them, jolting us either into laughter or shock (“There are the growing / and the dying and then / there are your ribbons”), as well as the conviction, present throughout the book, that the imagination can never compensate for the fact that our lives are fleeting and there is no greater meaning beyond what we create. “Most of the world gets embroidered in the end,” she writes. “We know that. It’s a fact we carry around / like a small sack of seeds with a hole. / Most of our lives get forgotten.”

—Robert Schnall

Transcendence has taken a hard hit over the last half-century or so, leaving few poets willing to brave the topic. Joanna Klink’s third collection, however, masterfully navigates the treacherous zone between the lyric and the all-too poetical. Raptus is packed with big abstractions—radiance, blessings, ardor, wonder, even “wish-clouds”—and should slip away on its own loftiness, but what anchors the book is implied by the double character of its title: “raptus” can mean both “rapture” and “rape.” Klink’s poems dance between these two poles: here “birds [are] motionless and quiet, / rubies in the trees,” elsewhere a window opens to a “mute, green world, / weedy and driftless, / a wind drilling rain, dirt.” The collection is most successful in its long poems, which tackle acutely difficult subjects: “Sorting” attempts (impossibly) to “sort each sorrow from each joy.” Ultimately, what proves challenging about Raptus is also what recommends it: Klink’s noble effort to embody rapture engenders moments of vagueness, including the uneasy sense that a poem can’t quite identify its subject matter. But these are more than compensated for by Klink’s otherwise precise rendering of her universe: “Sheep wool caught on barbed wire,” and “hairclips and sweaters, shoelaces and charms.” To articulate the ineffable is a bold project, especially given the bittersweet unlikelihood of its success. Happily Klink has the talent, determination, and wisdom to take it on and weather it: “Pleasure and failure,” she writes, “feed each other daily.”

—Amy Newlove Schroeder