words toward works in summary 2024

As always, could have said, should have said, more. Might have said it better here and there, worse than there and here. But these are the works/words I had to work to word myself through this year. All of them lovely and loved.

THEOPHANIES
poems, Sarah Ghazal Ali
Alice James Books, 2024

At the intersection of accidental and borrowed dialogues, there exists a holiness uncovered as a pre-existing condition and it’s there you may find Sarah Ghazal Ali’s poems as they have been carried into and out of, as they have been consoled for and cared for within, the collection Theophanies. These are musics of temporary permanence, and I now, as you soon, will not refrain from our mild but wholly offered singing. Precious and profane, mistake and miracle, these poems know praise as theft and ask the body to unfollow its gut. As a reader, I am always struck by loss in a way that makes me present, and, while I was struck no less different in the open places that Ghazal Ali closes with their housed verse, the queried losses made a trinity of new interrogations. The first loss of a language that uses sound to be seen, the double loss of birth, and the past loss of being given a name you can’t be called. I was present and was also soon to be made present. By its end, its beginning had restarted the proxy resurrections of its revelations, and I plainly understood and beautifully misunderstood what it meant or did not mean to be under those lowest gods that gift clay to any prayerful form bent from its time as a shape. Theophanies is a vessel that travels unveiled in a vision all should have.

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REJOICER
poems, Skyler Osborne
Driftwood Press 2023

Fuck you, Skyler Osborne. Just not kidding. Your dreamhouse chainsaw, zoo of the void. Fuck your shadow with nowhere to be and any of the future undead who’ve already checked out in the space that takes up the body. Just not not kidding. Rejoicer is a toothache quaking with joy. I don’t know what midwestern means, but I know what midwestern stands against. And this verse is a protection spell made historic by aftermath. The poems themselves become poems somewhere in the middle and any reader will probably have to restart to get any kind of closure. That’s how good the imagery is and how doomed its predictions. Its locality gives tomorrow an imperfect now and its look forward weighs itself in animals filled with the animals too slowly named. My gravedigger dies forever and I sing. I can’t love my teeth. Can’t pull joy from the air. But I can love this unshaken work. And I do rejoice.

~~

My Jewel Box
by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Action Books, 2022

While reading the mouth-bathed insertions as they are mid-written in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s My Jewel Box, I have this dream in a later body where I can be seen watching my veins do nothing in the same lab where it was once proven that god was buried alive. What valid surrogacy is this? As translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, it is a surrogacy of photogenic pain and pain’s plural. Of struck snake and of birth being both have and have-not. Adornment and strangling, says Olsen, says Jensen, and slowly suddenness is everywhere. I can ghost people I've never met. In this verse, in channels of otherharm, dolls dream but only if you notice. Maps are made from the worry that one’s anatomy is disappearing, not as we speak, but as we are silent. Words mean what sounds mean. I sucked on a penny as a child and my salt brain loneliness called it fruit. Are these your cow negatives? Mask loses a tooth. Mask has a cavity. In the reading, I’m not sure that I’ve ever had an allowable blue thought. In the after, I’m hyperaware of time’s inability to be present. Somewhere in between, or in the during, there is a restart of an irreplaceable beginning and it is here the work makes vaccines of permission and recounts, perhaps, touch’s second chance. This is the third book in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s trilogy, with the first being Third-Millennium Heart and the second Outgoing Vessel, each of which were also translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. The body has a body it uses to find bodies. God will get his unneeded rest, I’m sure. 

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Self-Mythology
poems, Saba Keramati
The University of Arkansas Press, 2024

Alive to the moment, but also beautifully dying in the perceived past of passage, Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology is an adult prayer of verse offered to the childish angel’s extra ghost. By which I mean it knows the black speech of plenty is lacking, and that language is a body no god can cut in half. If it left me speechless, it also silenced me in the looking. Keramati has an eye that interrogates vision with both image and with the after that image denies hallucinating within. Tanks carry the same indifference everywhere, and violence makes a glistening listener of the unheard weapon. It’s a very born thing. And a thing that hatches in the space the egg dreams it has reserved. It hurts, heals. Blood turns to blood from seeing salt.

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HIVE
Suzanne Mercury, poems
Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023

Suzanne Mercury’s Hive feels a firsthand account of something the world began with. How does pain get in? Fly low, sorrow. There is a spell here that knows math to be a lived-in magic. What else is here? The shrinkage of syllables into a hole that stores loss so quickly it somehow shortens longing. It’s a work that seems written in the reading, but also written again and before. There are colors I can’t say out loud. And why? The world is beaten blue and blue. Suzanne Mercury seemingly knows the abyss to be a joke in the void. It stings. Hurt repositions the superimposed. Stillness occupies nothing, but invades movement. Sadness roars. I am sure I am misquoting Franz Wright, but, in spirit, Wright said something similar or something exactly that sounded to me like this: How does anyone do anything? Hive is a sound. A brief, underlying, and futuristic sound, trembled brightly into the unheard now.

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In Defense Of The Goat That Continues To Wander Towards The Certain Doom Of The Cliff
poems, Darren. C. Demaree
April Gloaming, 2024

I was a pastoral infant. What a ridiculous opening. I only say that because I live in an Ohio where meaning came before utterance. I always thought deer were just lost horses. I was right. I only start this response and or AND reflection this way because of where I am and because of how Darren C. Demaree’s cries and silences of hope, confusion, guilt, and unknowing intelligences, versed as they are in the work In Defense Of The Goat That Continues To Wander Towards The Certain Doom Of The Cliff, have left me where I am which means they’ve left me seen in a place I don’t know how to get to. There is a gasp here that does not mean awe and a prayer here that does not mean worship. Gentleness is all seed, and dreaming a holy unthinking. I say horse. More often, I say deer. And now, this goat, this thing that is what it is, that is not creature any more than animal, not animal any more than beast, not human any less than god, wants me to say anything but goat. This is a fucking lovely book but even more it is a mirror subconsciously trolling beauty for the ugliness of its restraint. It has a music to it that knows song comes first. Demaree’s writing is a writing you miss in the reading. Doom is doomed. Art is a pause in the nil of pause. I’ve been reading Demaree for awhile now, and this work makes my reading feel brief. And human. And ongoing. Saying goat doesn’t still the goat. Said goat is already still. It breathes in the suddenness and in the longevity of our nostalgic selflessness. The end is near the end, and stops at the unsame time.

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Predators Welcome
Dylan Krieger
Limit Zero, 2024

A twosome seen by three mirrors. An intense slowness. An intricate demystification. Doubly homed horrors that miss your missing. Digital bloodstains on teeth we cannot lose. I want to be uncurious in the middle of anything put to paint and paper by Dylan Krieger. I want to undress so midwestern-esque. By which I mean I want to invite. But can’t. But won’t. Krieger’s Predators Welcome is such a melancholy nuisance and such a built deconstruction that one might not know how to reattach or when to return. Details kill the devil. Stalk your family. Avenge closure in the open. Krieger’s verse is a ghosted intelligence that raises the already heightened ecstasy of privacy. Open the book, sure. But close it when done. Let it eat.

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Sense Violence
Helena Boberg
translated by Johannes Görannson
Black Ocean, 2020

Helena Boberg’s Sense Violence, as translated in the before and after by Johannes Görannson, is a wounded spreading that knows to embed itself in the healing amnesia of sobered yearnings. Its anti-retreat is a two-sided debt that scratches the inner wrist of otherharm while scooping secondhand into the deep lottery of the sensual. There are pinecones in the mirror’s abandoned nest, and handwritings that die on the wall you imagine and that live inside the wall you can’t. Proximity starves distance. If reclaiming is a weakness we overproduce, then this is a return of rich scarcity. A return of the already to the thereness of a permanence mistaken for golden residence. Touch is a verse. Touch a tender anarchy. Touch a seeing that is looking for the looking that male witness has observed to the point of boring the vision. ‘Or the child / inexhaustible / drills into / the world.’ ‘Topple / through a window / let yourself hatch.’ Yes and no, memory. Be the last of our late hurt.

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Madder
A Memoir In Weeds
Marco Wilkinson
Coffee House Press (2021)

After reading Marco Wilkinson’s Madder, I’m sure age comes and goes but am not sure of the order or if there is an order. What embedded lyricism, what tended questioning. Among ahistoric ghosts, beneath cobwebs of unspun data in the garden of the historian, and in the slow hair of earth’s spidery dream, language here becomes a secret that tells itself and touch plants touch where it can taste its own exile. Origin, here, is folded in the thrice-ness of memory, movement, and mimicry. Trying to be the only thing in the world means one is close to being the last. Skin is made of stillness. Pictures die in the taking. Place comes from person. Sound has no father, but fathers proximity. This is a work that listens, leaves, and lifts. That corners nearness to give it space.

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DEATH STYLES
Joyelle McSweeney
Nightboat Books, 2024

I don’t know how it is that I know I’m not a great father. I’m not sure what I language. I bathe my 15 year old son or I tell my other sons to do it because my back hurts. This is enough non-fiction to be true. 

‘like a star you fail to hide behind your signal’

‘the sea doesn’t even wait around to hear itself’

To write toward Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles feels rude. Loss is boring. This isn’t about loss. What a surging patience. What a hidden stoking of the white fire that depletes nothingness. What an interrogation of the silence that silences the math of quietude. This work is such that it might bring about, or deliver?, time. Time can’t have kids, but can’t keep itself from trying. Time gifts itself a lengthy privacy. I don’t know what time is to you, but do know what you are to time. Is there an aftermath of during? A before-death of being? I want to cry and do. I don’t want to cry and do. McSweeney watches what looks. Inventories the constant. What a locating work. Disorientation is in the right place at the right…well, fuck. Keep this work close. It goes the extra subtraction.

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TOSKA
poems
Alina Pleskova
Deep Vellum Publishing 2023

Alina Pleskova’s inventive and non-recreated Toska is a simultaneously incoming and upcoming work versed in a voice thrice unreal. In the reading, I felt so distant from my own handwriting that I decided to not take notes. My worry began to worry, sure. But also, the hereness of my joy departed sweetly from two places at once. Pleskova’s writing is deeply spelled. Whether it’s the strange shortcuts that longing gathers to delay its arrival, or the stilled intimacy that leaves loneliness in a vehicle designed for reentry, Pleskova seems a first visitor of a remembered life and makes short agony of the current moment without timestamping our human, our outdated, anguish. Toska has better words for its words.  

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cute girls watch when I eat aether
Maria Hardin
Action Books, 2024

Self-shrugging through retouched harm, Maria Hardin’s cute girls watch when I eat aether tongues its verse across a scratched fossil of care and brushes the shrinking hair of its homegrown language in a mirror that keeps color as the grey fetish of the omnisad. Worry and magic, here, are two shops left by separate aggressive vacancies to the mind of the same fought-over shoplifter. Both online and in-hand, both paused afterlife and gasping search engine, it asks us to go skin-to-skin in a mini-museum of penetralia where I was, you were, moved. What a still stilling work.

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Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
K. Iver
Milkweed Editions 2023

K.Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is a vivifying work of the wrecked and the revisited. The world here ends might it outlast, or at least timestamp, revelation. Identity has two ghosts that meet in their sleep. I don’t know what I remember. Iver’s annotated amnesia is long on imagination, and has the memory of grief, and the verse distills both into tactile divinations and paused pleas. What singing. What an unmarred chorus culled from an embodied body so uncalled from its de-miracled angel. It's a collection to behold. And one that heartbreakingly withstands the withheld. 

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midnight minutes
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
Translated by Katherine M Hedeen
Action Books, 2024

All this access is a form of scarcity FUCK me these midnight minutes, as they belong and are disowned by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and as they are translated and mysteriously embedded by Katherine M. Hedeen, are scary and free and feed somewhere on the husks of nostalgia and on the etiquette of the invasive. What a gathering liberation, violent clarity, skinned touch. What a wound machine of season and childhood, of shortened story, of thing alive to the sleepy death of narrative. Night is a map mapped nightly by night. Night is a loose elsewhere. 

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LONESPEECH
Ann Jäderlund
Translated by Johannes Göransson
Nightboat Books, 2024

Ann Jäderlund’s Lonespeech lets sound do the clawing and makes of surface a thing once heard. As translated by Johannes Göransson, it is a work of remaining transmutation. Its verses of desolate accumulation form a one-being cult of the deceptively stripped-down, and with every word comes a new word you’ve only heard repeated. Infant loneliness, rain audio, fried speech. This is an endeavor of transformative non-ness. So, escape and swallow and return. A thing is time if you have time. A thing is time if you don’t.

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friends with everyone
Gunnar Wærness
Translated by Gabriel Gudding
Action Books, 2024

I don’t know what language I speak in. Someone says there is a fingerprint that makes all of us all. I don’t know what to say about being unique. I think you must be an accomplice to the word, or be a crime within it. Anyway, if you’re looking to reconstruct any scene, if you’re looking for a thing that does not leave before scarring with abandon, then friends with everyone by Gunnar Wærness, translated by Gabriel Gudding as if they were an owl made to live inside the sun, might be the lost book of anatomy, the gutghost bible, that your now-life is seeing and seeking. Full of removal musics, muscle amnesias, bleak holidays, resurrection holes, and braided nostalgias of the woven failure of a puppet future, the propulsive and negated verse of friends with everyone takes rock bottom to new depths and asks the recency nepotism of the fakeass current to surrender to a higher mantra and to the pop-sorrow of paused repetition might syntax reset the rhythm of oceans and borders and give the anti-syllable of empire a place to eat quietly and sing through its pseudo-therapeutic fast food glories of hunger’s gospel. Or something, or nothing. My breath caught me, is what I mean. And was taught, unteachably, to gasp.

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EDINBURGH NOTEBOOK
Valerie Mejer Caso
translated by Michelle Gil-Montero
photographs by Barry Shapiro
Action Books 2020

Locally unpredictable with a prehuman freezeframe warmth, Valerie Mejer Caso’s Edinburgh Notebook, as silently translated to vividity by Michelle Gil-Montero, and as unseen from below by photographer Barry Shapiro, is a work of angel bandages and spirit health that is transported and stilled by that ghost vein of connection that puts a body to our ways of being elsewhere. It’ll bring you to the knees of another. I think there is a car accident. I think there is a shadow that would burn itself fatherless on its sunbathing mother. I think there was and then I think there wasn’t. Mejer Caso catches time yawning.  

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You Don’t Have to Believe in the World
poems, William Erickson
April Gloaming, 2024

I belonged, once, and was given brief belongings. One such belonging may have been William Erickson’s deeply invented work You Don’t Have to Believe in the World. Repetition here is a woven fragility that loosens only at the tenured etiquette of delicacy. Erickson’s verse is both placeholder and future claim, and contains the letting go that is a roof and then a window and then a mirror with a stomach of rain. Shake every umbrella. Double every ghosted ghost and photograph that which wants a soul. I get drunk and read and don’t get drunk and write. I can do neither. I can do both. Work like this sobers me inward. Is a magic show for the disappeared. If brevity is a borrowed faith that only suffers those who return it changed, then Erickson’s poems coin their take with a madly measured giving.   

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Seraphim
poems, Angelique Zobitz
CavanKerry Press, 2024

Seraphim, as studied into wrestled voice and receivable interrogation by poet Angelique Zobitz, is a work of violent winnings that knows join and joy to be close enough in the saying as to allow the lovesick and the bloodwrecked to speak healing into and from the wounds of differently seeded desires. Whether an utterance redacted by the written or a writing redacted by the said, it is always a singing that hears a listening song and hits the numb note of a language lived as a taking that’s given to steal. Versed fully by confrontation and slippage, Zobitz creates these poems in the constant already of the present where home is a spell that none recite entirely might sound evade trickery and seek to word itself found in churches and game shows, at suppers and salvations. As a reader, I felt housed and shown, unsafe and cared for, lifted and more earthly for an angelology so riotous and rescuing.

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Black Pastoral
poems, Ariana Benson
The University of Georgia Press, 2023

I give up on beauty. And then, and then. Ariana Benson’s Black Pastoral is an anti-next of verse that stuns and revives, that resurrects to retell. It names names and knows origin stories have only to be shared to rectify their shoddy beginnings. It is a work of shape and vindication, a work of worried syllable excavated by words gone awol from their bland enlistments. Wordplay is wordwork. Wordplay means. Atrocity says its peaceful piece. I’m not sure how to recite this. It was here and I arrived in the after non-image of a brutal stillness. Benson writes love poems to places no map can map. Its claim voids reclaiming with its re-reveal. Be floored, be lifted, sure. But return to be also returned.

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SNOW
Lara Glenum
Action Books 2024

All wrecked attitude and in-house mania, Lara Glenum’s holistically punkish Snow is a fairy tale of reverent perversion as told from the side of two recut mouths. In verse of such unified doubletalk, it hurts to hurt. It hurts to laugh. Glenum is a student of the student’s deep child, and outsources the body acoustic and orgasmic and dooms it and frees it to roam for both leisure and pleasure in an open-air escape room. So knowledgeably sad, Snow has beats so bleakly hilarious that one might need to see if the house is coming from inside the call. You won’t hear it coming.

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My Life In Brutalist Architecture
John Gallaher, poems
Four Way Books, 2024

This seems invented. Not invented in the sense of being made-up, not in the sense of a tall-tale meant to distract, but invented in the way that a starter gun creates a stray yesterday, in the way that a chapter can absolve closure of its premature end. The riven this I speak of is John Gallaher’s movingly erased illumination as hallucinated by the nextness of now and as given the progressively remnant title of My Life In Brutalist Architecture. As memoir, as poem, as a thing secretly narrated and openly recorded, as hybrid meditation on adoption and lonely séance held for belonging, it is not a story for everyone but is a telling for all. Show me everything. The ‘hard joke, friend’, the cell clocked by the wrong time, the astronaut’s double, and the scar that won’t scar. Gallaher’s verse goes by quickly, but is not a single note, is not a brief music. It sings and songs itself into such inquiry that its asking has absence weighing in on the etiquette of disappearance and has its golden yawn gasping for shortness of breath. I don’t know. We might just be from those kissed places that a landless god won’t wash. Invented. In the way a ghost might fall asleep to the same repeating blip from an unfixed radar. In the way that same ghost elsewhere makes its own soul, then looks for it, then pictures it. Sees it twice from the same abandoned eye.

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Cadaver Of Red Roses
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
O, Miami (2024)

In the elegantly wrestled verse of Cadaver of Red Roses, poet Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi takes actual place and actual thing as a gift and re-gifts them as a fair and brutal math, a hungry and clawed-at grammar, a headlining and interrupted voice. Its anger illuminates hallucinations that are ever-present, and its peace reverses ritual might its purple prayer leave a mark looked for by a bruise. It says yes, and so what, and it sings home using the notes of the seriously remote. So sing, so look. Keep pace. Its portals have softspots for the void.

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With Deer
By Aase Berg
Translated by Johannes Göransson
Black Ocean, 2012

These holes keep appearing. In my shirt, in the ground. A hole can be almost anything glowing with shame. Aase Berg’s With Deer is dangerous. Especially on Saturdays. Saturdays aren’t real. Johannes Göransson’s translation of With Deer is an excitement. Excitement as tower, as ruin, but also excitement as satellite. It is thrilled to have enemies, is what I mean. No matter, no matter. The lookout’s grief blips through radar after radar. Radar, before. What a bronzing of sin. I carry a snake in an insect’s dream. I look like hell in the place where my intestines meet. Inside joke, outside sorrow. I don’t know where else it happens, this inventory of squirrel loneliness, this ghost reverb of haunted autopsies. These are landmark injuries. Go there, go here, as wax figure, as mannequin. Let burial go. And throb in some groundstruck ache.

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Bluest Nude
Ama Codjoe, poems
Milkweed, 2022

The blue of childbirth, of snowfall. Blue the lost tooth of rainwater. Blue as it is pained into aching for ugliness. Blue as a shape that not so much shifts as moves in reverse to reverse. Ama Codjoe’s Bluest Nude is a cleansing work of saturation both transient and kept. It dances away and in place, as a spider’s dream twinning its silver invite between light and death. Redaction and revision refuse to share an afterlife, but meet in the mud as the clayed rendezvous of lyric and verse. This is the stuff of making. The body as a wordless spell. As nakedness stripping beneath an unfinished star. There is always an image one must entertain to be a form. Codjoe sees it, and sees it change. 

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Outside The Joy
poems, Ruth Awad
Third Man Books, 2024

I hear, here, a remembered crying. I scrape forgiveness from Ohio to Ohio without a sound. I am in the bearable deepness of Ruth Awad’s latest poetry collection, Outside The Joy, where inquiry is a crop unjudged for the blueness of its yield. I want to tell you where I am that you know I’ve disappeared. Loss is an animal changing search parties in a museum dedicated to exhibiting the same, held differently, gun. This is a verse of hidden performance and dark display. Mother, sister, place, peace. Awad is a poet of the between-life, of old anger and resettled cure, and works this work into one of unmarked resettings to love the world with burnt care. How else, how else. Inside the inside, it shapes answer with response, and whole gods lose muscle to the memory of carried creatures.

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Material Witness
poems, Aditi Machado
Nightboat Books 2024

I saw a path back there and miss being able to take things. All at once I am reading Aditi Machado’s Material Witness. What a moveable withstanding. Continue, time. Language says cheers when it has a word for endangered excess. Cheers to language y’all. Machado is a chemist in love with wind. A poet of distance who can hear the telescope’s hunger. The kids were kids and their bodies, prose. This is a rescue mission. A giddily embedded work of our paused and overrepresented rebellions. Of the underthrown mundane. There is something human going on here that’s learning to exist. Machado casts speaking as the deepest silence needed to de-narrate presence. Mad comet. Disciplined radar. Last recipe of the observed. There are hands in the back of my hands and I stand beneath this clock of saying. Weariness fakes its own sleep study. Speculation stages its own abandonment. Witness outsells absence with homemade samples of invisibility. I don’t know what hope is. A thing, with. 

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The Girl Who Became A Rabbit
Emilie Menzel
Hub City Press 2024

Emilie Menzel’s divinely obsessed The Girl Who Became A Rabbit is a salve of exile, an exodus of fixation, and a delayed devouring. It is never one thing longer than two things allow. It dances with staying, moves history, feels steeped in anew. It has a language for language, and what comes next has to come next. Whether giving otherness a beinghood, or taking bait to its secret unhooking, the verse has a mean proximity to distance that presses the neck for a pulse then wraps the wrist in a melancholy of modification and merge. The book itself is a sincerity machine where form forgives shape but doesn’t die on a shadow. Where body cares for body at the prayer of its reckless idea. No reading, here, is lost. Not in a writing this hungrily unharmed. Not in a poetics so chimerically alone.

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Moon Flogged
poems, Réka Nyitrai
Broken Sleep, 2024

I adore the poems in Réka Nyitrai’s Moon Flogged. I worship without purpose. I am lost here where loss gets the nothing it deserves. This is the work of a third language. Of an equal. I don’t mean equal as something controlled. I mean an equality built on an erratic focus and condemned by unusual landlords. It’s an expectant nowhere that goes everywhere. The verse here combs like a ghost barber through the hair of those distracted by the abandoned erotica of a neckless god. This is a poetry of visual sense and illogical logistics. Lovely and odd, it’s the alien bird that feathers its spontaneous theft with secondhand keystrokes and it's the domestic fossil brushing for fingerprints rolled across the weak monitors of our projected tenderness. I mean to get carried. Away.

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Desire/Halves
Jai Hamid Bashir
Nine Syllables Press 2024

Carried into recognition by an insufficient believing, I want to sound like I have held things. As for the sound itself, I can’t tell you how to hear. I think Jai Hamid Bashir’s ‘Desire/Halves’ might be a place maps listen to. With mouth as a memory center, Bashir’s verse makes its bones beneath silent orchards reddened by the respoken language of woozy flashlights. The mirror we’re looking at isn’t there and its snapshot memory is a bluesick reminder that despair is a string tied around the bruised finger of one who kneels in the dream just as an eyeball begins to sink through the moon. As such, when reading this work, we are near the body that exhumes image and not far from the brightly bored forms bathed in the local. Leave your eyes where they are. Unplug your angel’s lover into the gaslit déjà vu of touch. I will hold my belonging and I will lose it to this work, this half, gasping after the lyrical apostasies of its long hosanna.

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So Much More
Darren C. Demaree
Small Harbor Publishing (Nov 2024)

As it sings re-choired in the collection 'So Much More', Darren C. Demaree’s work is the starstuff of purpose and confrontation. Signs, tattoos, vacated crows. The un-reminded world. A shapeshifting violence that roots us to form. An offering of unrest carried in the body of a deerlike creature that touches nothing with its living while living in a believable church where sleep can be turned on and off by any two of three hooves. Demaree’s verse lets home take us home because there’s a second time to have nothing. No insect is a lost insect. We are not, and were not, long for heaven. There is no earth, but here we are. Our children lovely enough to be terrified.

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Dictionary Of Bodies
Kristyn Garza
Gasher Press, 2024

Wreath, wraith. Define an identified body. Plot knows how I got here. Here is a place that houses the danced around thing. That languages lostness into being lifted from a touchless tongue. Here is Kristyn Garza’s Dictionary Of Bodies. Nuance of trauma, ghosted latticework. Somehow is, somehow was. Time is a time machine. Garza is a poet of the invitingly unexplained. Ask and answer kneel on the same knee. Prose assigns its invisible birthmark and invents independence. Saying and speaking have a long distance relationship with brief evocations. What work. Have surface, save face, and share a firefly.

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Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect
KOSS
Diode Editions, 2024

The poet KOSS, in their collection Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, gifts static to the white noise of seeking and renders movement a thief of starless locations. We crawl colorless over the bodies that reach us. Eden was a eulogy. To a microscope, everything is far away. It is here I miss the child my child was. Touch is biblically lonesome, and leaves no signature that can be matched in the secular interiority of this open air temple where said we say the renamed name. Whether pre-mourning the severed magic of hand acts, or predicting scansion’s still life with time machine, this verse clocks history long enough to get back its ghost deposit. 

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The Tattoo Collector
poems
Tim Tim Cheng
Nine Arches Press, 2024

Of generous absences and identity bestowals, Tim Tim Cheng’s liberating and grounded signage as etched in The Tattoo Collector is an undertaking of invisible kindness that takes care to hold capture as a thing departing. This is inquiry of the vividly extraneous sort, and lovely for how it hears hurt and for how its listener replays its resurrections as a deejay mining beats from the dead a-side of ideas. And it is loved. For the maybe of its perhaps-esque whisper that tells a secret secret to a secret that speaks speech to power. For its rescued misunderstandings and trapped immunizations. For its situational distractions and near afield obsessions. One can’t control a birthmark. Somewhere a reddish prayerful river is slowing to transfer a blank apple into the least wild dream of a godsick bird. Be early to this skinwork. Track this verse.