Reviews: Four collections of poetry

"Rose Quartz," by Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe. (Milkweed Editions, 136 pages, $16.)

A thread in Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe's adeptly woven debut is the story of Little Red, a runaway, journeying through the punk scene. The wolf is a blond rapist, but there is no huntsman. "I pull myself out through its matted fur and take one full breath."

Spells turn "words into power," which is also an apt description of LaPointe's poetry. A miscarriage is alchemized into: "I gave birth / to a fist / full of petals." In these lovingly forged poems, she tracks a solitary healing journey: "my breath my only company."

In describing a concert where "people tumbled their limbs like lovers against me" or listening to tapes of her grandmother's voice, LaPointe conveys with dazzling intensity that while our healing is in our own hands, we need not be alone.

"If I Could Give You a Line," by Carrie Oeding. (The University of Akron Press, 61 pages, $16.95.)

In her second collection, Carrie Oeding, who grew up on a farm outside of Luverne, Minn., unspools long poetic meditations by considering a single word. "Line" is a poetic unit, an aspect of art, a signifier for waiting, or "a telephone cord to stories and signatures." "This line is not a path," Oeding prepares readers for her conceptual meandering.

"People are really dumb about babies," she quips, her deadpan style punctuated with dazzling similes: "I have as many feelings as an umbrella that can't be opened."

Many poems narrate looking at art, including the boredom, distracting thoughts, and an overheard scoff at her baby stroller. These rangy poems ask: Once you accept you are having a transcendent art experience, what else becomes available?

"the heiress/ghost acres," by Lightsey Darst. (Coffee House Press, $16.95, 112 pages.)

Lightsey Darst's fourth book is divided by two photos: one of Darst's slave-owning ancestor and one of herself. The first half, "the heiress," considers white mothers' role in historical racial violence and the myths that absolve descents from taking corrective actions.

In the second half, poems tumble into the unmoored yet static atmosphere of "pandemic planet." Here Darst, winner of a Minnesota Book Award, finds that her solidarity with other mothers is fragile. When a Black woman at a protest asks the crowd to consider her son, Darst admits, "I would mother him from a safe distance." She reveals how white motherhood can be an excuse: "Don't talk to me about revolution. I have children."

In this book, realizations "fall out of the walls like ancient bones."

"Rewild," by Meredith Stricker. (Tupelo Press, 86 pages, $21.95.)

Meredith Stricker opens "Rewild" by asking: "will heaven exist if I live the way I live?" Her spare, precise lyrics raise another, equally intriguing, question: Why make art at this moment of crisis?

Because "the imagination must create" an alternative to this "extinction web" caused by greed for "the money of bones." Art can imagine a space in which rewilding and renewal is possible; "the world is not / yet emptied," she reminds the reader, showing that nature can return when people step aside, as in the DMZ between North and South Korea "where cranes / repopulate serpentine deltas."

She laments "how rare, resistant / the unbuyable has become." Poetry is "unincorporated ink, wily, unprofitable," and calls attention not only to what's gone wrong, but also to "fern fronds, unfurling/like a shell, taking the shape that makes justice possible."

Elizabeth Hoover is the author of "the archive is all in present tense," winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Poetry Prize.