It starts

Hatred and doom

Took it torquing jealous into my gut. I flamed
& I came to kindness

and these lines are indicative of the poems in this book - direct, urgent and gutsy. The collection starts right in there, at the core of something. There is no circling and scene-setting. From the start the poems are engrossing, intense, alive and intimate. You are not just witness to these revelations or a mere bystander, the I of the poems speaks to you, asks that you listen to these discoveries or uncoverings.

I didn’t have time not to burn myself
the trajectory of the pan too important
& I fucked it up

I get this feeling that in some sense the reader becomes the page, the receiver of these [personal] amazements at the world. And that too is a concern of the book, the poet, who is listening? who is receiving me?

The poems have an incidental note-book quality that makes them very readable and immediate. They seem simple, but they are fluid and flexible, they transform, take great leaps, and are unafraid. As a result they’re full of startling imagery and a strangeness. They move from the ordinary to the miraculous with ease so that, for me they’re full of precision and clarity like dance:

I soaped myself and presented

myself in a soft light

a breathing light

I would thank you
for embracing me
& your head, then I was pushing away on you head with my feet
into a huge bright horse I was inside of
& I knew I was imitating, because my legs could make no gestures
that had not already been made.

But as I said right at the start, these poems are very funny. The poem God was not personal to me made me laugh out loud with the bit about ‘& there was me, wearing a fuckable mighty.’

They’re funny in that things-are-scary-and-funny-and-weird-aren’t-they? kind of way. There’s all this housework and pain and poetry going on and these enormous questions about God and what is self anyway? So I guess there’s stuff to ponder on. And I will read this book again, between the housework and the poetry and do so.