Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Poetry ought to be the preeminent form of this age hell,everyage.
Its the quintessential hybrid form: an amalgam of essay, lyric, story, polemic, and diary.
Poets are penguins, to paraphrase E.E.
They use their wings to swim.
More importantly, poets can reshape the world.
Four standout collections in this first month of the new year specialize in such transformation.
These poets reconsider the past to to enrich the present and future.
This isnt a story of war, she writes.
This is the mother on the idea of a son at war.
Mothers dominate the collection.
Hart writes of these people, and her own struggles, with unwavering humanity.
She could have lived so many lives.
Beyond her admirable tenacity and spirit, Laux is just plain wise and refreshingly unpretentious in her wisdom.
As grief overcomes her in Abschied Symphony, the poet writes:
Death is not romantic.
that factis stark and one-dimensional, a black noteon an empty staff.
He dances, / drunk, agog with gong sounds.).
Anna May Wong mutates, in the heartbreaking finale, into a webcam girl.
Of all the books here, Alyans best exemplifies poetrys hybridity.
Her poems reflect the cultural collage of her upbringing.
Im divisible only by myself, she writes in Dirty Girl.
In Gospel: Texas, she recalls her grandmother / asking the Burger King cashier / forpommes frites.
But just as frequently, Alyan indicts herself.
You wanted me sober / so I drank.
Ive always liked my lies.
And later: You know me.
Ill spin my bruised hipbone / into an affair one of several infidelities in the book.
These honest assessments begin, finally, to yield hard-won results.
After she got sober, a nurse … asked me about God.
