Steven D. Schroeder's poems this week firmly push tongue to cheek and present us with a mouth full of snark. The poet moves through possibility with each line, only to close that possibility on his reader. What Ifs are quickly followed by Probably Nots. We often look to poems for their redemptive quality, but Schroeder's work here shows us that there isn't always a nice tie-up or quiet realization at the end of the muck. That no, sometimes there is just muck and more muck. Even the close of "Gin Don't Mess with Me," with its final word "Amen," takes on a troubled connotation, and Schroeder makes us ask of the everyday what it is that we're actually blessing.

Sophie Klahr's poems at once bustle with noise and are eerily quiet: “Unimaginable: the dull florescence, / canned laughter, the hush.” They take place in hospitals, living rooms, and bus stops. With disarming intimacy and immediacy, these poems are “fluent in emergency,” haunted by addiction and irreconcilable distances between lovers. There is directness in Klahr's plain yet musical language that serves her material well: “this is the living room. this is the moon. this is us kissing; that’s us in the mirror. that over there? is new jersey.”

At the end of Jaswinder Bolina's "Sunday, Sunday," the speaker likens himself to "an echo in reverse / gradual and deafening." Instead of a voice travelling away from the speaker into a high-ceilinged hall or massive cave, Bolina's voice originates outside the self and travels louder and louder toward both the speaker and the reader until it disappears into our mouths. Fueled by litany and enjambment, these poems reveal the self without letting the self know. The speakers of "Aviary" and "Sunday, Sunday" mediate their emotions through geography and technology. In "Aviary," Topeka becomes a repository for the unthinking movements of domestic life and later for the regrets of adventures never had. In "Sunday, Sunday," emotional states become physical locations; moving from one state to another is a matter of will, of hopping in the car and going. When the speaker is at his most exuberant, he wishes to express it through technology ("I wanted to text you my brightening outlook"), and at the lowest point of the relationship, the speaker's own failures are revealed through failed technology (broken car windows and a demagnetized debit card). Though his speakers tap dance around lyric expression, Bolina ensures their performances draw a bold circle around what is not being said. At his most "gradual and deafening" in "Oops Canary," Bolina places himself in competition with the songbird, challenging that his stories have more truth than the bird's song and admitting that he sings in order to impress. Jaswinder Bolina does impress, and his poems reverberate cutting emotional truths (except for that part he made up about the whales).

The second of these three poems by Sean Thomas Dougherty, “Like Gauze” includes an epigraph from “The Spell of the Leaves” by Larry Levis: “But when I think of her, nothing has happened yet.” Such an epigraph is undoubtedly important when placed next to Dougherty’s beautiful work, for no living poet to my mind has so deeply reconciled that troublesome interrogative that Levis posited in “The Perfection of Solitude: A Sequence”: “What does it mean, American?” These poems along with many others in Dougherty’s impressive volume do not shy away from the question of the Artist’s role in relation to the larger political, social, and cultural conundrums of contemporary America. Dougherty’s speaker does not self-deprecate or “apologize” when challenging the inequities, malignancies, and abuses of power in America today.

These three poems by Justin Runge construct themselves through an accumulation of images that are both individually discrete and also inextricably linked. Not one stanza enjambs into the following stanza. While at first this might sound potentially stilted, Runge uses this separation to create a distinct boundary between the poems' images. The first poem, "The Conspirator," opens with "A locomotive rose- / maled in mourning / heaves off steam." The stanza breaks, the image rests, and the poem pauses momentarily. The next stanza begins anew, simultaneously growing the poem and creating its own proprietary image: "It takes the last war / casualty through / the smoke remnants / like a somnolent / crosses the room." These images work together to create a single poem that we experience in separate moments. Runge asks us to process and contemplate each image on its own, lending the poems a weight and consideration that deepens their emotional impact, challenging us to figure out whether the "swordplay on stage / must be choreography, / must be red scarves / jetting from the chest."

This is a little embarrassing. The first time I saw Annie Hall I was visiting a friend’s apartment in college. Senior year, actually. I only caught the ending, something about eggs. Years later, I finally watched the film with my girlfriend (perhaps not the best idea) and only after completing the film, dwelling upon all of my failed past relationships, did I happen to look up Woody Allen’s biography on Wikipedia. There was Mia Farrow. There were nude photos. There was Soon-Yi Previn. And here I am, all these years later, reconsidering my anxiety about eggs, about relationships, about the fundamental role of differences in any romance. And I’m grateful to Natalie Shapero for it. In these poems, Shapero slices and dices, mixes and matches. Each portion of the “Four Fights” sequence incorporates dialogue in the form of point and counterpoint. Yet what really carries this sequence is what follows from the simple banter: we get a great deal of revelation from a speaker I imagine is a Freudian condensation of Mia Farrow and Annie Hall, someone who can speak back to the dreariness of a Manhattan scene, the differences between orgasms, the ultimate unfairness of the neurotic playwright getting with an underage girl. Here, beyond the ironic humor, we get pathos.