August Smith

If language is a space, who is allowed in? If history is a story told by the powerful, what gets left out? With her second full-length collection feeld, poet Jos Charles twists these two concepts together and bends them to her will. The result is a wholly avant-garde book of poetry that reveals a queer history embedded in the castaway detritus of our language.

A winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, Charles’ feeld is a hybrid work of medievalism and digital nativism. The numbered, unnamed poems operate in a mode that’s part-Middle English, part-texting lingo, brazenly synthesizing these two poles: in one poem the speaker tells us “it is horribel / of corse to be / tangibel,” wisdom that feels timeless; later, “thomas sayes trauma lit is so hote rite nowe,” a statement decidedly post-2010s. 

Readers looking for a historically accurate pastiche of Chaucer will be flummoxed. So, too, will those looking for the clear-eyed contemporaneity of Charles’ previous work. The obscure misspellings, surprising homophones, and wildly oscillating register of the poems work together to construct a small, hermetic world of their own. Reading this book feels like piecing together the forgotten scribbles of an alternate dimension’s literary history. 

Having remixed the past, Charles places queerness at the center and explores it from newly revealed angles. Her poems are fragmentary, beautiful, and inventive. Poem “VII” informs us “a tran lik all metall is a series or sirfase in folde / wee / call manie of these foldes identitie” and suddenly, identity is made material and pliable, likewise language. Just as the reader is able to grasp this idea, the poem ends with a surprisingly humorous turn, “u maye / be manie foldes but not / lik the waye an asse / bothe is and isnt conected to this chare / fase / layk.” 

By the end of the collection, one is struck by how perfect the title “feeld” is: the book is both a fertile, untrodden space and a flurry of emotion warped through the past tense, less felt and more feel-ed. 

Jenny Xie’s debut book of poetry, Eye Level, aims its gaze at two concepts: time and interiority. To arrive there, her poems travel through cities, landscapes and memories, exploring them with a voice both isolated from the world and communing with it. The result is a stunning collection—part travel narrative, part kaleidoscopic autobiography.

The winner of the Walt Whitman Award, Eye Level works in contradictions: It speaks from solitude yet dwells in an array of communities; it ties itself to concrete places but has deeper psychological concerns. “Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground?” the speaker asks in the opening poem. “No matter. The mind exists both inside and out.” Eye Level mediates that dynamic. Things are felt in both senses of the word.

Xie’s imagery is like an Etch A Sketch being shaken and redrawn, moving rapidly through gritty scenes in miniature. We encounter “Karaoke bars bracketed by vendors hawking salted crickets” and a “motorbike with a hog strapped to its seat, / the size of a date pit from the distance.” The speaker speaks of their “coarse immigrant blood,” their “fishbone days” and “fatty grief.” The month of a May is a “slow peach.”

These tactile moments pull us through Xie’s relentless probing of location, both in time and space. Time has a physicality throughout (“I pull apart the evening with a fork”) and is intertwined with familial history, a realm where “suffering has its own logic.” 

Xie’s lively formal approach incorporates many styles; most notable is her series of haibun, a combination of prose poetry and haiku (a form pioneered by Matsuo Bashō, another poet who traveled the outer world while exploring the inner one). That’s what makes Eye Level such an enchanting read: its ability to be everywhere and do everything at once. It draws its energy from all over and then finds its way directly to the heart.

Drawing from her study of the Bauhaus movement of 1930s Germany, award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang’s latest collection of poetry, A Doll for Throwing, is a carefully crafted meditation on the relationship between time and form.

Bang is a poet known for her innovate technical approaches and her ability to tease dense philosophical ideas out of unexpected places. A Doll for Throwing fulfills both expectations: The poems work within a deliberate form, and they utilize a rich historical reference point to build a moving narrative.

That historical reference point is Lucia Moholy, a Czech-born photographer and artist who became a figure in the German Bauhaus architectural movement. Bang fictionalizes details atop the bare facts of Moholy’s life, hybridizing poetry, fiction and nonfiction; when she writes, “Every day was a / twenty-four hour stand-still on a bridge from which / we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to / catch sight of the future,” we are not only hearing Moholy’s voice, but the broader lyrical “I.” The future in question is not only our future, but the past’s future—the present.

Most of the poems are tightly-wound blocks of justified text with titles lifted from Moholy’s photographs. Their shapes simultaneously suggest the blocky lines emblematic of Bauhaus and the rectangular shape of photographs, and their content borrows heavily from both disciplines while breaching into more human concerns. For example, the poem “Me, A Chronicle” starts in cold architectural language: “Shapes that begin as just one solution to a common problem / can go on to become an inflexible method.” But it develops into something more ruminative: “I see my father crossing / the room to open or close a window. My mother’s zigzag / pattern of static . . . Who hasn’t felt that in/ order to breathe, she has to splinter the first self and leave it / behind?”

Bang’s forward-thinking approach finds footing in the past to comment on our future; herein are critiques of political extremism, xenophobia and domestic trauma. A Doll for Throwing cements Bang’s poetry at the forefront of many poetic realms, all while maintaining a shape of its own.

Vivid, unsettling and uplifting all at once, the second full-length from award-winning poet Danez Smith is part elegy, part celebration and part poetry-as-witness. Smith is a black, queer, HIV-positive poet, and these are the poems of a person not only navigating their complex place in the world, but dictating it firmly and without recourse to everyone in earshot. 

Smith is a poet famous for fiery performances—their reading of “Dear White America,” a poem included in this book, has racked up more than 300,000 views on YouTube—and their passionate confidence bursts through the seams of these poems, whose subjects range from police brutality, to the complexities of queer eroticism, to the very experience of living in a country tha threatens the lives of queer people of color daily.

Formally, the poems are deft with couplets and tightly-controlled stanzas, stringing together visceral imagery (“the bloodfat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir”) and direct, politically-charged constructions (“i’m not the kind of black man who dies on the news. / i’m the kind that grows thinner & thinner & thinner / until the light outweighs us”) while always obliged to the music of the phrase. 

Smith often employs the serialized poem to contain massive and complex subjects, and these longer works prove to be the most powerful and gut-wrenching moments of the book. This is especially true of the opening poem “summer, somewhere” which imagines an afterlife for those killed by police brutality, a place “where everything / is sanctuary & nothing is gun.” 

Not content to merely allow us to play witness to the horrors of oppression, Smith’s poems pull us into it; they brim with blood, violence, aches and broken bodies. But there is humor, too, and hope, and it’s this hope that elevates the book to its crucial contemporary importance: “but today i’m alive, which is to say / i survived yesterday, spent it ducking bullets, some / flying toward me & some / trying to rip their way out.”