Ravage and Snare

"Tomorrow is knocking out my teeth from within." With its priestly humanity and demotic heartiness, this book is the debut of a considerable talent. A songbook of immigration, family lore and self-invention, Ravage & Snare seems to have been perpetual from the moment of its composition. In these poems, the categories of lyric and narrative are dismantled and reconfigured in language that dashes thrillingly from level to level of history and fiction, low register and high. The overall effect is medieval, though the scholastic scope is always tethered to the real-world "Zion of jaundice and tar."