In her latest collection, An Orange, A Syllable, Gillian Sze asks, “how to measure one’s mouth by its words?” This question, deceptively simple, sets the tone for a work that is as much an exploration of language as it is of perception and embodiment as it is about early motherhood and childhood.  Sze’s meditations frequently hinge on the elasticity of language and perception: “in that fit,” she writes, “I resided inside her mouth,” collapsing registers of distance into intimacy.

The collection unfolds with the energy of attention accelerating into life itself: “Each word a car.” Elsewhere, a hole appears; an “Ow” registers. The poems acknowledge the suddenness of experience as if life is a surprise, as if the poet and speaker did not know the shape of a mouth before the advent of the child.

This poetry is informed by the lens of observation, but not of the coldly scientific kind; moments of “utter joy” pepper her account of the child’s learning. Reading An Orange, A Syllable, I thought of Melanie Klein, a clinician watching an infant with intense, discerning care, but the poems never fully settle into that clinical distance. Instead, they inhabit a space between close attention and wonder, exploring the acquisition of speech through careful observation of the child’s brilliance. Sze’s imagery – of the mouth, the sun, the square – simultaneously opens, brightens, widens, and gapes throughout.

These are small epiphanies, granular meditations on speech and the relation of the self to the world. This poetry is urgent and alive, a work of observation and invention that bends the formal and the lyrical toward a singular purpose: to observe and to wonder at the astonishing mechanics of speech, and being. “the light     speaks its own language,” she writes; “we pass through its vocabulary           without fear.”mRb