Hardly Creatures
by Rob Macaisa Colgate
Books of lyric poems work like museums: We enter, we wander, we investigate, we marvel at our favorites, if we can find them, and we ask ourselves how they came to be. Colgate’s exciting, sometimes shocking HARDLY CREATURES (Tin House, paperback, $16.99) makes that comparison explicit, then gives it a disability focus. Section headers (“Medical Portraits”; “Exit and Gift Shop”), and symbols (a wheelchair; CC for closed captioning), and some poem titles (“We Do Not Enter the Gallery”), imagine the collection as a museum devoted to disability access, a space made of language in which “you are meant to be here.”
Inspired by (among others) the DeafBlind poet and essayist John Lee Clark, Colgate unfolds a welcome array of poems about his own queer, complicated, sociable life in New Haven and Toronto: his love for his friends and for his partner, Eli; his “shame in pursuing happiness”; his schizoaffective disorder; “body dysmorphia”; and what advocates call disability gain, the way other senses and possibilities sharpen when one of them gets undermined or removed.
Colgate’s poems attend, delightfully and exceptionally, to extraordinary bodies and to shared physical needs (“I go over to Lorraine’s on Thursday to lift her onto the toilet”). Better yet, they attend to the joys, the constraints and the weirdness of new and old poetic forms. Colgate can roll accounts of his life into ghazals, stack them in abecedarians, shuffle them into sestinas or drop into a cascade of intimate truths, much in the manner of C.D. Wright: “I am not brilliant. I do not know how flowers work. … When gender dies I must find a way/To remain fabulous. One thing about psychosis is that the physics/are fabulous.” So is this astonishing first book.
Doggerel
by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Tender figures of fatherhood, raising boys; idyllic walks and a “bike ride” through “Italian countryside”; the poet’s Jack Russell (called Taylor or Tay-Tay); and other “small/Dogs who appreciate the chance silence/Gives” unite to make Betts’s fourth book of poems, DOGGEREL (Norton, $26.99), a welcome respite from almost every other serious book of poems you could read this year.
Domestic calm and the chance to catch your breath carry more meaning here beside the earlier life Betts recalls in other poems: Incarcerated as a teenager, Betts (“Felon,” “Bastards of the Reagan Era”) found acclaim in his 20s with carefully observed verse about the ordeals and lessons of prison. Now a Yale-trained lawyer, memoirist and MacArthur “genius” fellow (as well as a visiting lecturer at Harvard, where I also teach), Betts can still look back on his time behind bars, when the word “kite” meant a letter from outside, an imaginative flight. He takes in, too, his sometimes chaotic childhood in Washington, D.C., comparing it to his own modern family: “the only burden too/Worrying is never seeing your father/Weep.” Few poets match Betts’s way with quotable rhetoric. Better yet, he gives good advice: “Suffering in art feels like somebody made/It to tomorrow, at least.”
Balanced free verse — with echoes, at times, of Yusef Komunyakaa — prevails, with several ghazals thrown in: The demanding forms in Betts’s first books occur less often among these lanky meditations, where, perhaps, “the only curse is anger.” Vigor and sharpness, however, seem to Betts far more than a curse: His symbols include not just dogs and basketballs, but — a warning? a vision of beauty? an erotic token? — the elegant butterfly knife called the balisong.
Close Escapes
by Stephen Kuusisto
“What do the people say in the next village/They’re just talking to horses in the winter wind.” So goes one of many aphorisms, rapt statements and pointers toward the unknown in Kuusisto’s CLOSE ESCAPES (Copper Canyon, paperback, $17), which brings to mind the attractions of Nordic nights, cold skies and literary forests, “the book of the pine” and “the ministerial book of the birch.” Part lyric sequence, part verse notebook, Kuusisto’s gathering of hushed moments, meditative asides and noticings “beside the painful river of waking” echoes earlier writers who used their verse to acknowledge the world’s great unknowns: W.S. Merwin, for example, and the Swedish Nobelist Tomas Tranströmer.
Kuusisto, who teaches at Syracuse University, often takes his cues from Finland, where he spent a year in his childhood and whose poets he’s translated elsewhere (he quotes them here). A memoirist and essayist as well as a poet, Kuusisto has received acclaim for writing about his blindness, as in his 2018 book “Have Dog, Will Travel.” It’s a topic here too, one his verse will not let us forget, though he rarely makes it his only point. His well-traveled life, and his reliance on senses other than sight, suffuse the quiet scenes the new poems construct, outdoors in the snow, “beside the abandoned woodstove,” or indoors under the spell of poetry, another “game best played on the floor,” where “puzzle wish fear and ache/Are what a magician is for.”
Other Times, Midnight
by Andrea Ballou
The single lines and isolate sentences in Ballou’s OTHER TIMES, MIDNIGHT (Persea, paperback, $17) look stranded in more ways than one: They follow folk tales’ laments for missing husbands; grief for a lost child; the day-to-day bewilderments of an introvert in a hurried and crowded world; and the poor fit between the supposed wisdom of myth and the hard frustrations of family life.
In a motel, “a soul cries out to me … says it wants to live. Leave. I can’t tell which.” A dreamed, retold fairy tale finds Ballou “contemplating a vast wall of ovens” beside her dog, then morphing into molten salt: Hansel and Gretel meet Lot’s wife. That’s how she looks when she travels — but home fares no better. “Everyone in my house has a ripped face./My job is to re-upholster them.”
The Massachusetts-based Ballou looks back to the past, to other times and other souls, in search of advice, and finds only more challenges: Her stripped-down free verse (think Louise Glück meets Dana Levin) seems always in search of unobtainable answers — perhaps “an ice-age word, or pre-Columbian,/something with feathers on it.” The poetry, as she knows, comes from the looking, from the moving on, “the work of living in the arch itself,” the gateway to some afterlife we can never explore. Decades of writing (and a background in Spanish-language literature) have gone into this laconic and wise first book, where long-delayed second thoughts, long-awaited romance and long-term mourning become the enduring subjects: “Remorse docked her boat,” as Ballou writes, “long ago on my shore.”
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