Lisa Russ Spaar

“Up!” she signals, syllabic cup
     meaning wherever I am now—up
or down—floor, high chair—change direction!—

Ancestral or learned, such threats, 
   tonight’s charry staircase of heaven—
crash, storming, splitting flicker shards,

Crucial early bark
   to learn, like dat?
Or no! The wooden ball

If you were to shoulder a heavy bat
& beat one today, many decades after—

The blushed syllable it wore 
with its whole body,
tawny rose-hip orb
of antique origin,

Quartal voicings, the alcohols. 
Swallows in a martini sky, jigsawed

Early mystery,
out of what century

Famously late, light reaches us
eons past its own extinction,

Primitive angiosperm, genus 
prior even to bees,

“Think,” Aretha Franklin and Ted White, Aretha Now, Atlantic, 1968

Much has changed in America and American poetry in the nearly forty years since Richard Howard published his expanded edition of 1969’s Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. The 1980 table of contents itself tells a significant tale of those changes: forty-one poets under consideration, six of them women, not one a person of color.

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Perhaps poets are attracted to edges because, as Anne Carson puts it in Eros the Bittersweet, “Words…have edges. So do you,” and perhaps also because notions of the self tend to form in response to and because of those limits. Identity—what Emily Dickinson called the “Campaign inscrutable / Of the interior”—has always concerned the lyric poet, but what might constitute a “self” has perhaps never been more prevalent on the public radar than in our current moment. In three new, mercurial books—Magdalene, by Marie Howe; In Full Velvet, by Jenny Johnson; and Milk Black Carbon, by Joan Naviyuk Kane —poets resist, succumb to, and transgress the identities—familial, social, ecological, biological, sexual—to which they attend.

I’m looking for poetry I can’t resist. Poetry that arrests me, reads me its riot act, signals my rights, detains me with its linguistic and thematic force (high volume or seductively subtle), and liberates me with a subtext of human culpability, vulnerability, acceptance, and possibility, what Emily Dickinson would call its “costumeless consciousness.” 

Unmarried, the heart ejaculates
what it must, scarlet-purled, arterial,

away, away. Or conversely, married,
it requires all—venous, freighted with wastes.

Nervous, twigs split, become swallows, 
jeté the platinum poring chits

over horizon’s bistered tinge.
Is a murderer secreted in us all,

Poetry is broken language. Even in its “prose” incarnations—proems, prose poems—when lineation is not formally observed, poetry works the break. It interrupts, truncates, burglarizes. Poetry ruptures and ameliorates.

Against black matchsticks,
rotted fangs,
plus and minus, sum lines, mathematics, 

Ink slurs into byssal threads,
split blue caskets of mussels
scapular in ritual archipelago, butter, cream,

Kimberly Johnson, Alex Lemon, and Brenda Shaughnessy take up the poetics of God-lust with renewed, edgy, often darkly humorous imagination in distinctive second books of poetry.

Pubic tufts, thyme & moss, are greening
 again in the clefts of the wall

latticed by the first flails of warm, late winter,
 and so she removes her shirt

Pitched between the mind’s “cool remove of moonlight” and the body’s “lurid plurals,” these poems enact the ineffable with a spectral exactness

My blue too lavish—
    what strange powers
Hast thou, as a mere shadow—

First the red maples, gilt kudzu
    stropped and razed to bloody dust.

In the night shop's Gothic theater,
where unstrung carcasses of violins
and cellos are laid out on tables

Then they were seized,
the four bodies,
the burning staves.

Above the kitchen table where my children color,
their big calendar frames a drawing—

I want to give you
more than these words
finite as husks
or a string of barbed wire.

As the early-evening Metroliner slows
and sidles at dream-flight height
through the apocalyptic back lots
and whistle stops of New Brunswick