Years ago, a favorite professor recommended that I read the same poem at different times of day and in different locations. “You won’t believe the difference,” he told me. I didn’t believe him and didn’t take the assignment seriously until very recently. Michelle Taransky’s poetry, in fact, is one of these recent cases. I took these selections with me to the living room in the morning (easy enough), then to the woods in the afternoon (I’m on vacation in Georgia), and finally on a back deck in the evening (many many bugs). It turns out my professor was right, especially in the case of poetry that somehow “gets” the landscapes it describes. And Taransky’s poetry definitely “gets” landscape.

I love the brevity and compression of these poems by Louise Mathias. Routinely, they aim towards a combination of disjunction, beauty, and the grotesque, but each one achieves this in a deliberately unique and characteristically bizarre and lovely way. They compel me to agree with Louise Glück’s admission that, she is attracted “to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence.” Where the poems lack in “abundance” they thrive in their economy and in what her speaker withholds. Take for example “Admonishment,” which both fulfills its title’s promise and seems to withhold its own secrets as well:

In this poetic series, Andrew K. Peterson probes the interplay between individuality/isolation and community through his observations of life in Harvard Square. Beginning with Hanna Weiner's statement that "[w]e have unknown collaborators," he looks out on this microcosm with a compassionate and engaging eye. As observations and images progress and accumulate, he asks us to participate in the world–both the recollections and images of his world embodied within the poem and our own outside of the poem–as simultaneously observer and participant. We become hyper-aware of our dual state as individual separate from our surroundings and as communal participant with both the world and our fellow individuals. Peterson makes his own way by writing alone though writing of others; writing alone though writing to others; and writing alone though embracing others. All the while, he has faith that we will find our form of participation and become individual collaborators. He, with us accompanying, can then approach periodic moments of ecstatic clarity, where instead of a cluttered mind, we find honed attention allowing us to draw "a complete blank" and create that "statement releasing history / as vacancy."

Bradley Harrison says that he “firmly believe[s] in a healthy balance of reverence and irreverence both in art and life.” The former is probably why he decided to brilliantly beat the bejeesus out of his own poetry in this amazing series of erasures. The latter is probably why I enjoy watching the process, his poetry continuously stripped down and torn into tinier and tinier kernels of lyrical truth. Over the course of these four poems, everything adorned and fabulous and unapologetically more about the opening prose piece is chiseled away, until Harrison’s readers (or, at least this reader) feels like the victim of a Zen drive-by. Everything was taken away, sure. But lose all those fancy word possessions, and we’re left with a deeper, more terribly lovely story.

Who is Erica Anzalone? Rumor has it she’s the premier designer of sonnets–if you want a sonnet that packs a knife in one pocket and a comb in the other. For those of us who like our poems gritty and gorgeous, these sonnets are a revelation. They pick us up with Rothko, Bolshevism, sharksuits. They seem to have practiced the couplet many times before they took us out. And they drive a fourteen line convertible so you can feel the wind in your hair. When Anzalone’s sonnets finally get to the Hollywood sign and show you the whole city from above, they deliver a line you didn’t even know you had been waiting for your entire life. A line like “The rainbow I chewed up and then I spit it back.” Or maybe “…he knew how hope / was little more than antifreeze in an old // jalopy.” What can I say? These sonnets have swept me off my feet. There’s just no way I’m getting home by midnight.

Megan Martin often calls her writing “hybrid things,” a phrase which when Googled for images produces photos of a rooster rhino, a zebra frog, and a Mazda Tribute Hybrid SUV. The latter of these speaks especially to the “thinginess” of Martin’s description of her own work. Martin’s genre-blurring “things” are material objects, and their subjects hoard the tangible stuff that they wish to become or, at least, the stuff into which her speakers wish to disappear. The speakers in this featured pair of poem-things define themselves by their proximity to something else—to natural disaster, to the outfits they wear, to eclectic tokens at a garage sale. Though the other characters in “City Armor” fuse to their outfits such that murder is the only way to release them, the speaker is less perfectly adorned. She accumulates wrappers and newspapers for her outfit, covering herself in printed words that nobody stops to read. That passers-by don’t read the papers she wears is less the speaker’s concern, it seems, than that passers-by never stop to read her. She clothes herself in a disguise that makes her more difficult to understand when she’s in the city, but once she’s in the middle of nowhere, she can’t get away from herself. She never becomes the clothes she wears, nor does the speaker of “How You Get Love” become the disasters whose behavior she imitates. The speakers in these poems can never figure out how to become something else, even in the face of love, into which the speaker might like to dissolve. The self, that “most unreliable thing,” persists.

While conducting research for this introduction, I discovered something very strange about Heather Christle. For two weeks in July 2011, after Christle released her second book The Trees The Trees, you could call her number and she would read a poem from her book. Since I only just learned about these telephone readings, I never called, but I wonder what it’s like to call a stranger and ask her for something, her work, to perform or to not perform. I wonder if she took time with callers or quickly did what was asked of her. I wonder how she selected poems to read, if something in the caller’s voice was enough to make the selection or if their selection was predetermined. That is, caller one would receive poem one, caller two poem two, and so on. I wondered if they wanted to tell her things, tell her things like the speakers do in this week’s selection from Christle. In “The Seaside!” we question whether the captain listens and if our speaker will ever be free from his devotion to this figure and the sea. Love is the trap—just as in “How Like an Island” the “we” is moored to the sea’s floor. There is breathlessness, urgency, and desperation to these poems as if at any moment the person on the other end may hang up that phone. Christle delicately balances this against the absurd. Read these. Then call a stranger. Tell them a secret. Hang up before they can respond.

The speaker of Travis Mossotti’s poems possesses energy at once hilarious and wild, heartbroken and feckless. Adjectives used in this sense are not synonymous with being funny, edgy, sad, brave and comical (though, the poems are all of these and more!). Instead, I mean something teetering into the realm of madcap—a livid and ludicrous Odysseus chained to the masthead of his beleaguered trireme while those left of his crew dutifully row past the sirens’ song, hearing only the dumb show of hardening wax. Perhaps it is the contrarian in me to experience deep fear and anxiety when I hear conviction or humor in one’s poetry; however, Mossotti is the rare writer who manages to pull off this balance of vulnerability and self-assurance, as in the opening of “To and Fro”: “There’s a quiet valley in my heart and / a noisy public restroom in my wife’s / bum knee.” A weird and unsettling first few lines in a poem, but that’s to be expected as the poem exemplifies the indefinable and the idiosyncratic interchangeably. “To and Fro” questions whether the life lived merits a comic or a tragic ontological explanation. While settling for both and neither, Mossotti’s speaker takes his oddball sense of the world with more than a grain of salt. Rarely can the idiosyncrasies of a poetic speaker become as infectious as they do here. I’m pressed to recall others—James Tate, August Kleinzahler, or Wallace Stevens—who exercise this attribute so poignantly well.

New Orleans is just as much an idea, a fantasy, as it is a place, just as all the “great” cities are, and even some of the not-so-great ones. Through Amanda Auchter's eyes we see not so much documents of a city as much as stories informed and inspired by the legendary city that is New Orleans. These stories are as odd as they are beautiful. In the one persona poem of the set, we have a nineteenth century baroness speaking after she survives four gunshots from a spurned lover. “How animal in my desire/ to live: my body a plague// of gun-shots, starburst/ wounds” she says, and we hear echoes of Auchter's very personal earlier work where so often the speaker is Auchter herself. Among the accomplishments in this set is the way she makes these stories feel so personal.

The last line of Tom Raworth's first poem below presents a series of disconnected words that at first glance appear possibly made-up: "camouflet zline unshun fursonae". On my own first reading of the poem, I interpreted the line as the breakdown of language, the result of the flash memory of the previous line having become corrupted through the waterboarding in the previous stanza. To my surprise, however, these words did turn out to have meaning: "camouflet" is "the resulting cavity in a deep underground burst when there is no rupture of the surface"; "zline" becomes "z-line," referring to the borders between the basic units (sarcomeres) of a muscle, the junction that joins the sarcophagus to the stomach, or the blocking of a specific user's IP address; "unshun" combines the negative prefix "un-" with "shun" to create an understandable neologism; and "furusonae" is also a neologism combining "furry" and "personae," referring to "an animal character used to represent oneself online or in furry role-playing."