I like to think of JARED STANLEY’s Ears as a friendly rejoinder to Frank O’Hara’s “Personism,” a brilliant collegial corrective that places the poem not between two persons but just simply between, as open to the gritty wind off the Nevada desert as to the spy novels and hot wings of the anthropocene. Indeed, for Stanley, the poem is a form of listening to environs: an “open trick, composed of ears” whose signature magic is an enchantment that has an ethics, an enchantment that enacts “the mandate of inanimate friendship.” This book is an ecological manifesto, an unembarrassed declaration of dependence and love for the world, a kind of manual for turning toward animate and inanimate others with fierce and friendly attention. “I’m pretty sure I’m a sorcerer,” Stanley claims, and the necessary good work done by his poems’ wayward charms convinces me he’s right. Ears is magic we desperately need. — Brian Teare
BEN MEYERSON’s Holcocene makes something beautiful and penetrating out of the genre of the post-human apocalypse, the wasteland domain of intelligent machines. The Greek of his title signifies a new era peopled by robots seeking the sea, as they seem compelled to do by programmed hints installed in them by their now-vanished human creators. As Meyerson’s lost machines muse, grieve, wonder, and seek to grasp their vanished maker, an elegy emerges that is perhaps a prophecy: “once we have learned the lambent scar / of what is human, I / will bear it up, then // take you and comfort you.” As in Karel Capek’s R.U.R., at the end of the human experiment of self-travesty and destruction, the I and the Thou and love have re-emerged, or persisted. These machines mysteriously become our voices, in which we survive beyond our errors. In them, despite our delusion that we are mechanisms, we live as song: the lovely, thoughtful, sorrowing, bewildered, courageous song that Meyerson creates in Holcocene. — A. F. Moritz
knife | fork | book 