Subterranean

"Growth used to be growth before it ate itself," writes Greenfield (Tracer) in his challenging and transfixing third collection. Nature here is sprawling and grotesque rather than beautiful ("Run-off fed the dead lake"), and wealth is a marker of decay: "such abundance-of carcasses." Ostensibly an elegiac musing on the death of a father, the collection exerts itself through strange, contorted language to account for every thought a death might affect. The result is an intricate and engrossing journey in search of precision, even when the results are lengthy, or dense, or ugly. The poems take form somewhere between prose and center-justified lineated verse, a liminality supported by the uneasy mood that Greenfield's em dashes and caesuras create as phrases collide with and then separate from each other. When a more traditional prose poem, "Occupy the Specter," appears halfway through, the contrast of its pace and assertiveness serves to affirm the other poems' commitment to what Greenfield calls "Slippage, in mindlessness." This is a difficult work, attuned to language's harsh and combinative forces as well as to decay engendered by economic growth often assumed to be purely positive. Readers willing to travel with Greenfield into the root system he unearths will be rewarded by the sensory reorientation his words offer. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.