In “Masculine / Feminine,” one of the many shorter lyrics that populate The Hermit, Laura Solomon states, “I dreamt of a poem in which I mastered all my feelings.” But these poems are better thought of as a record of consciousness when feelings take over, unfettered and given free reign: absent the rigid structure of straightforward logic, they float between admission and omission while creating an emotional map of an interior life that struggles to come to terms with the self in the context of others. Through airy and sensual language, Solomon tenderly grapples with problems of identity and perception in poetic lines charged with the dangers and pleasures of emotional life. “Philadelphia,” one of several longer poems that anchor the collection, charts a truly lyric progression, a narrative that builds without concern for getting the story straight, interested instead in evoking and enunciating the right expressive pitch in an intricate sequence: “everything / tastes better when it’s precious and you / bear in mind daily / historically how many / protons had to collide in time / to make you you.” Here we’re treated to the kind of minute attention that enriches and broadens our view of the intricate loci of our identities. Throughout the book, Solomon enacts a subtle struggle with identity that is couched more in emotional reality than in categorical constructs. She gracefully records “this song of love for now and nothing,” acknowledging the ways in which all understanding is both mutable and everlasting.

—Nate Pritts

I didn’t begin Lisa Fishman’s Flower Cart at the beginning or finish at the end. This seemed in the spirit of thing-finding that drives the book; even the title is taken from a billboard. “Well sometimes an object may be put to use,” one speaker muses. Some of these poems interact with photographs of found documents—a notebook “for speed and efficiency,” a 1910 workbook called Trees I Have Seen, parts of which have been left blank. In these pieces Fishman stands silently and points; she herself is a reader of what we are reading. What’s found in rubbish bins can also be “found” on the page: “There is so much that happens / in the little words.” That goes for language as well, which the poet retrofits to new purposes even as she produces it, treating letters as objects: “o, o // I unhooked these from the wool / border / in order to hear / out.” This kind of play may satisfy the hand organizing the page, but ultimately Fishman proves a sharper reader than writer of incomplete stories. The silences in her poems aspire to the use of blankness in the texts they speak to, as when the sentence “Do not kneel” appears alone on a page. They rarely achieve this, perhaps because time and anonymity have intervened in the older texts. But Fishman succeeds in facilitating a conversation between her poems and found materials, erasing context in order to distort language, over which she otherwise exerts fine control.

—Leah Falk

Rather than bombarding readers with passages of excavation or revelation as its title implies it might, from unwritten histories gives voice to identity and experience. This tension is conveyed in poems that withhold certainty in regard to both their content—“most of the time I mistake someone for someone else,” “probably it happened but who could now say”—and their form, which snubs conventional punctuation and capitalization. You won’t find a single period, much less a dash, in this whole book, but you will find a white boar, Motor Trend magazine, cupolas, saints, and a host of quotations from both famous and lesser-known European writers. These generous-spirited poems are indebted to Tomaž Šalamun and to poets of the New York School, but the themes are alchemized to an Ališanka-specific context as the speaker endeavors to define a complex Lithuanian-European identity, a contemporary masculine identity, and a literary identity. The inclusion of the Lithuanian text alongside each translation underscores a sense of delighting in the unknown, since every turn will bring most of us face-to-face with the impenetrable originals. Some might therefore feel excluded from this collection, which also tends to appreciate men for their minds and women for their bodies, but by the time we read “answers are questions / there shouldn’t be too many questions / therefore don’t try to figure out everything at once,” there is ample reason to be glad that, just as he’s made us privy to “unsent” and “unwritten” letters, Ališanka hasn’t heeded his own advice.

—Kristie Kachler

As a writer, critic, and editor, Albert Mobilio has represented some of the best tendencies in experimental poetry over the past twenty years. Author of three previous books of poems, in his latest he pares down his chiseled writing style to bare essentials that at the same time function as gleaming ornaments. Primarily consisting of short, lyric poems whose dense surfaces are generated through accretion (“wheel’s teeth per inch; / wordage over blood pressure; / speed at which cylinders spin; / or nickels enough to fill / his fist”), the work in Touch Wood resembles a precisely sewn patchwork with edges both frayed and razor sharp. The poetic fragment arose in response to the twentieth century’s fundamental brokenness, and there is a sense of the bruised, of the suffering stapled to every happiness, pervading Mobilio’s poems: “My lovely intricacies dying / on a soiled vine; my bleak worm eating // away at life. Such vaporous declension / from the normative.” Thus, the book tips between contrasts: “the wrong way of thinking // is always next to the right one.” This isn’t the same as the struggle between beauty and art also waged in these pages. Like in a good film noir, a dangerous seduction duels with a clumsily frank masculinity: Mobilio knows the way a person wears ill-fitting and scratchy clothes—reluctantly, resignedly, and preferably not all day. Because deeper than any gender or even sex is the pulsing animal body beneath. The brain’s attempt to make sense of this unruly material world is a form of disfigurement called art, or as Mobilio perfectly terms it, “these bleary weirds.”

—Alan Gilbert

The arabesques of sense and syntax in black seeds on a white dish, Shira Dentz’s debut collection, challenge the reader to some speedy catch-me-if-you-can linguistic play. Her sensuous figurative language, from catachresis to synesthesia, calls to mind the exuberance of the Song of Solomon, but where the biblical poet compares a lover’s teeth to a flock of shorn sheep and her breasts to twin deer, Dentz tells us that voices “smelled like suede” and that black is opened “clear down to its neck.” In the poem “U,” shape prompts inspired associations: “Reaching into the bottle’s mouth; gullet. / Very tiny bottle. / Like a vault, / like a pleased mouth. / Upside-down breast. / The thing I would hold in my hand.” Gradually, pieces of what might be narrative emerge and coalesce—a brother’s death, an overbearing father who “blew cinders,” an unapologetically adulterous lover. Certain of Dentz’s spirited, provocative titles—“Poem for my mother who wishes she were a lilypad in a Monet painting,” “Rorschach: Last week, the moon dipped close to the gray streets, a surprise guest, huge and yellow”—hand the reader a clear sense of sentiment and occasion. Grammatical fragments occasionally frustrate, as if Dentz were conducting too many experiments at once—Marjorie Welish–style elisions, Fanny Howe–style evasions—but overall, the poems in black seeds on a white dish reward multiple readings, particularly the longer poems, such as “Here,” which are inventive without succumbing to whimsy as they sketch a jangling world.

—Celia Bland