VQR Poetry – serie

This debut collection of vivid, lyrical poems explores the emotional landscape of childhood without confession and without straightforward narrative. Chang sweeps together myth and fairy tale, skirting the edges of events to focus on the psychological tenor of experience: the underpinnings of identity and the role of nature in both constructing and erasing a self. From the edge of the ocean, where things constantly shift and dissolve, through "the forest's thick, / where the trees meet the dark," to an imaginary cliffside town of fog, this book makes a journey both natural and psychological, using experiments in language and form to capture the search for personhood and place.

The poems in this collection are meditations on the natural world, written from the perspective of what Li-Young Lee has aptly termed "a passionate interiority." The history and geography of the American West inspire many of the poems' investigations of the environment and the role of the individual in relation to that environment. In Cecily Parks's landscape made strange by human consciousness, being lost is a requirement, though not a guarantee, of being found.

This follow-up to Patrick Phillips's award-winning debut navigates the course of the male experience, and particularly young fatherhood. Like Virgil's Aeneas, the book's central figure is in the middle time of life, a grown man with an aging father on his shoulders and a young son at his hand. Phillips's plainspoken and moving lyrics add an important voice to the poetry of home as they struggle to reconcile fatherhood and boyhood, present and past, and the ache of loving what must be lost.

Victoria Chang's collection takes its title from what many call "the worst weed in the world," a plant so rapidly and uncontrollably invasive that it is illegal to sell or possess in the United States. Chang explores this image of vitality and evil in three thematically grouped sections focusing on corporate greed, infidelity and desire, and historical atrocities, including the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China and the massacre of Chinese people in Nanking by Japanese troops in World War II.This edgy, fierce subject matter becomes engaging and fresh as Chang applies her powers of imagination to the extraordinary lives of Madame Mao, investment banker Frank P. Quattrone, and others living at extraordinary historical moments. In "Seven Stages of Genocide," for example, the poem's speaker is herded into a death camp along with a neighbor that he strongly dislikes: "The barbed wire around us forces me / to catch his breath that smells like goose." Chang focuses her attention to occurrences in the world that many poets find too violent or disturbing to write about, thereby making her own distinctive aesthetic from that which is, like Salvinia molesta, both creepy and beautiful.

In this book-length series, poems with titles such as “Illustrating the theory of interference” and “Illustrating the construction of railroads” are paired with nineteenth-century engravings depicting phenomena from geology to astronomy to mechanics. Yet the poems relate to the images in an oblique rather than a direct way. Poteat uses this framework to construct a mysterious and engaging book that inhabits many worlds at once, bridging the real and the imagined, the traditional and the experimental, the surreal and the ordinary.As each diagram and scene gives rise to a poem that intertwines the life of German artist and printer J. G. Heck—imagined, as little is recorded—with Poteat’s own, the book reveals a preoccupation with landscape that encompasses both the precision of Heck’s carefully labeled sine waves and brass devices as well as the eeriness of his depictions of skeletal hands or dogs tearing apart a wounded boar. Poteat’s intense interest in the natural world is set against a sense of a world behind the world, where each living thing is properly named and the Spirit glows purposefully above the forest, ready to heal if asked in the correct manner.From “Illustrating how to catch and manufacture ghosts”: Tonight there is no wind. Even the heat / is on its knees, and the moths laying eggs / on the side door are not being honest / with themselves. Though their enterprise / is beauty, the eggs will not last through / the rains, and so it goes. / A slug, fresh as cinnamon, steps through / the snuffed coals of my stove.

Daniel Groves presents a debut collection of tightly rhymed poems that, through adherence to form, unlock a power in language to surprise and illuminate—a power too often dormant in writing that eschews these conventions. Enchanted by the wit and distance of his canonical predecessors, Groves rhymes “Diet Pepsi” with “catalepsy” and “Guido” with “credo,” and takes this work from irony to introspection in the course of a few lines.Framed as meditations that playfully depart from acts of photocopying, or shelving journals in a library, or interstate travel by bus, these poems represent an acerbic inner life but offer visceral satisfactions.

Attempting to stitch a quilt of language for the new millennium, Kyle Dargan finds himself in his third collection propelled forward by a mélange of voices—individuals passed on the street, journalists, philosophers, movie and cartoon characters, hip-hop emcees, and fellow poets—all of which build to a self-diagnosed logorrhea dementia. Dargan’s voice channels an America mentally fatigued from a decade of foreign conflict yet cautiously hopeful about the promise of the country’s renewed introspection.In these poems, rife with the anxieties of the aughts, Dargan seeks to destabilize social and cultural landscapes believed to be settled—breaking and clearing ground to lay the foundation for a new American perspective.