Like Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Sarah Tolmie makes it clear from the outset of her second poetry collection, The Art of Dying, that she is here to skewer everything, not just the easy stuff. The Art of Dying is a modern-day take on the Ars moriendi – a traditional text that offers advice on the protocols and procedures of “dying well.” Tolmie’s speaker is presented as an authority, sardonically steering the reader through the mysteries of death and dying.

Where The Art of Dying falls short is in its insecurity with this leadership role. Often, the boldly combative openers – “Most books of poems are far too short. / It’s hard to get your money’s worth” – fizzle out by the time they reach their end, or defensively push the reader away – “I’m not a Fitbit made for your mind, / Here to whittle your taste down a couple of sizes.”

Sometimes this glibness is effective, as with a reflection on miscarriage that sidesteps sentimentality and ends up breaking your heart:

I had to abort a fetus once at fourteen weeks.
That sucked but was less agony
Than its putative life, all back to front, a wreck.

But more often than not, it is in moments of vulnerability that the speaker presents true confidence. There is astute compassion in discussions of assisted suicide, the fleeting life of an imaginary friend, and the confusion of hospital stays that deftly turn daily incidences into larger existential considerations:

If things change, we’ll let you know ASAP.
Yes, thanks. I understand.

Things are much less clear than you might think
Here at the brink.
It’s very wide, though uniformly steep.

In these direct, personal brushes with death, Tommie is at her most clear-sighted, stripping away the rubble of euphemism we use as a salve against the enigma of death. (MH)

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At some point in your elementary school education, you are required to make a family tree. Those from complicated diasporic backgrounds often find themselves traumatized by this – your tree is jumbled; you are a failure already, simply because yours is a narrative that is different from the status quo. Greg Santos’s Blackbirds presents family histories that soothe these wounds – family gardens in place of family trees – histories that leave space for the expanse and ambiguity inherent in the diasporic experience.

Santos uses crisp, direct language, with an informative style and a sensitivity that extends from the familial (“I want to coddle the egg, hug its insides”) to the political:

Our little American town is exhausted.
Please help.

A master of understatement, Santos presents one-liners that twist the reader around with their contradictions and sudden shifts in scope. In “I Have a Problem,” he opens with: “All I care about is everything,” while in “Hangry” he posits:

How do we respond to this horrible day?
I watched a video of how instant ramen noodles are made.

These meditative asides work to highlight the necessity of enjoying simple pleasures in the midst of the larger complexities of life. Whether those complexities are related to family or the political landscape we currently occupy, Blackbirds excels with its confident inner logic.

Always tender-hearted and often heartbreaking, Blackbirds heals the bruises of living in the twenty-first century with a unifying sense of resilience. The speaker finds emotional salvation through reclamation of that which has caused harm, most touchingly in “I’m Dog, Who Are You?” – a piece where the speaker reflects on the many violences of the word “dog,” yet ends with the overwhelmingly sweet intergenerational scene of a father playing puppy love with his kids:

Who are you?
I’m dog. I embrace my dogness.
Are you dog, too? (MH)

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Sit How You Want, Robin Richardson’s third poetry collection, is relentlessly uncompromising in its brutal, often unflattering honesty. By virtue of its stubbornness, the collection captures the complicated facets of womanhood, abuse, and power with a raw vulnerability that is uncomfortable to read yet absolutely absorbing.

The speakers in Sit How You Want are contradictory: they constantly reinvent themselves, often without success:

…………………………………….I have been sculpted
to a crown then found too heavy, and removed

They long to be seen, even when it means facing violence. They frustrate themselves with their inability to subvert their own submission, and in this they mirror the truth of many abusive relationships – violence is easy to get used to when it’s what you know:

………………………………………………Same insatiable
old conflict: What pains, what intoxicates.

Robin Richardson strikes me as poetry’s Elena Ferrante, with her presentation of genius women in powerless situations turning the tables on the men in their lives through language. She has an impeccable rhythm with words; these poems have a maximalism that drums masterfully, with meticulous internal rhymes and jaw-dropping, biting poetic disses:

In a Star Wars-themed fever dream
…….I saw him lassoed by a solar flare and held
there in a warmth I couldn’t provide. Blue light
…….clicked as I woke, wishing

caffeine came easy as a boy of twenty

This keen eye extends to the structure of the book; Sit How You Want’s heroines exist in timelessness. They can be both mother and daughter – “She’s a child. My child: Me.” – at one time. Richardson is working with a controlled burn here, a journey from confined, private terror to a loosening of ties. Perhaps there is no freedom from the violence of men, but Richardson presents a freedom in how this violence is absorbed and redistributed. (MH)

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Tanis Franco’s debut collection of poetry is as dense as it is moving, with new dimensions presenting themselves on each re-read. Franco positions nature against a changing body with skilful grace, creating unexpected metaphors out of chained trees, pebbles, oceans, and excavations. In “anthroposcopy,” parts of the body are mined for connections amid their surroundings – “the forehead is a plain scarred with grooves” and “the pupils are craters of ash.” The body adjusts, as nature does, embarking on a journey of unfolding and exploration – “hope is the slowest emotion but it is tireless.”

Quarry explores various forms of bodily intimacies, and Franco’s images hold a sensuality that breathes through even in darkness or doubt. In “voyeur” the speaker studies bodies through the window and seems to meld into them:

there is no difference between
in / out, you / me

While later, a tantalizing image creates sparks of sexual tension in a bar interaction:

crack me open a club soda
and spray me like a wave –
who i am doesn’t matter.

Franco’s speaker shrinks and blooms with the seasons, learning through observation. They are an amorphous observer, evolving over time in the ways they seek an understanding of their own body and humanity through nature and their surroundings. More than any one specific, defining piece, the book weaves a sense of continual evolution and emotional growth from beginning to end:

in the salvation army a man with his wife, staring
flat chest, hairy legs, hairless face
……..i pass by close to say, i am real,
……………………..an invitation to figure his discomfort

Quarry lovingly layers academic and philosophical references in a way that fully integrates them, burying them within their heartfelt questioning while remaining entirely emotionally accessible. (MH)

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In East and West, Laura Ritland explores feelings of foreignness, nostalgia, and loss in ways that insist on simultaneity. In the last suite of poems, “Outpost,” the speaker admits and asks: “I was of two minds […] Just where did I think I was going with thoughts like that?” Being of two minds, for Ritland, is not the premise for equivocation. Rather, it speaks to the ability of the poet to understand her subjects deeply – “A respectable, wood panelled / apartment,” for example, or pigeons, for another. Ritland’s debut collection is rich and smart, which is why she can successfully write a multi-page poem about the airport and plane travel with wonder and without cliché. This is how she lets a poem expand:

Entering the terminal’s shipyard, I gave
my secrets to the x-ray and my boots
to the nation. We fed our watches and belts
to a ticking furnace.

Ritland’s ability to make the familiar strange without being coy makes any place she takes you worth visiting. This collection, though, is also about leaving, and what is lost (and generated) in leaving repeatedly. There is the sense that if one always feels foreign, that feeling is what becomes familiar. It becomes so intimately known that the speaker expresses desire through this feeling: “O make me / foreign to homesickness and exile.” Homesickness is a “geographic hunger,” but it is not just a longing for
a place; it is a desire to understand one’s history:

………Did we belong? We were related.
A lineage of exits and arrivals, patriots
of a barber’s chair, a small country we’d visit
and abandon in the tradition of our elders.

This is a book of detail and depth beyond the given examples, with tours through the air, the ocean, city streets, bodies, histories, and futures, with a speaker who understands “The gravest error […] was to believe you stood alone on a shard of time.” (TL)

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In their collection Delet This, MLA Chernoff immediately alerts us to the keyboard and the text itself. It opens like this: