Hannah Karpinski’s beautifully designed Lateral Sway opens on the road, following maps, clouds, and the receding figure of a lover walking on ahead. Karpinski writes toward motion; these are poems that seem to ask to be read while moving through the world – walking down the street beside a lover or potential lover, swimming, driving, or drifting through summer light. Karpinski animates her work through lateral motion, but also through proximity: bodies brushing against one another, voices half-spoken, and meaning carried through gesture and punctuation.

Ampersands appear everywhere, a desire line through the book. Karpinski’s syntax continually folds one thing into another, as in “the same ball of time,” or the “top that I like” passed back and forth between lovers. Even desire acquires the shape of the ampersand’s looping motion: “desire attaches / to its slippery objects & / hits you again on the descent.” Connection is figured as gesture—upward, downward, lateral, recursive.

While many of the early poems in the book are bright, sunny, and wet paeans to summer – “sometimes I is summer or I is you” – they become less seasonally tethered and more spatially located as she details a “self-imposed residency” in her grandmother’s apartment in Poland, where she sought to understand the textures of Polish LGBTQ+ life. The resulting poems register the “fear of legibility,” the uncertainty of how queer love will be read in public space, and what it means to move through environments that may or may not accommodate “the beauty and the averageness of two women in love.” 

Even as the collection confronts assaults on queer life both at home and abroad, it resists despair through its insistence on relation. Karpinski’s poems continually return to direct address, to touch, to community, to the sustaining force of companionship. Even in its final gestures – Karpinski describes how she wrote an early poem in the book while “shuffling in the snow in depths of winter” – the collection continues to carry its momentum forward.mRb