Half-hazard Poems

Tracy, a prolific author of tween and teen fiction, debuts in verse with an irresistible collection selected for the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award. These energetic poems showcase a writer who knows how to draw readers in-with short sentences, quick turns, and a comic edge that courts disaster. Tracy opens with an escape from a religious upbringing: "I fell from a Bible. A half-blonde tease./ With a good good start, I struck out/ God-filled and thrilled." She recounts spotting a former coworker having sex in the cooler, admitting that "Tight-assed and aging. Beholden// only to her own climb and joy. It took me years/ to admire exactly what she'd done." Animals are ever-present across a variety of settings (zoo, circus, yard, canyon) and in visceral encounters that would rewrite the scripts of captivity and danger. For example, the tiger at the magic show "could lead a completely different life if it stopped/ being so good at performing." The title poem, a wacky villanelle about the putting a girl on the moon, amusingly presumes she would be safer there than on Earth: "Does a girl who lacks parties turn blue in pitch black?/ Dangers here. Perils there. It'll go how it goes." Readers should feel refreshed by Tracy's enjoyable turn to the lyric. Agent: Sara Crowe, Pippin Properties. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Nearly 20 years in the making, this debut collection from a prolific children's author won the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award and was previously a Yale Younger Poets Prize finalist and a Walt Whitman Award semifinalist: evidently, it was worth the wait. Written in an open, conversational voice, the collection begins with the speaker saying "Good-bye, Trouble," walking away from her rural, Bible-Belted beginnings toward what she assumes will be a brighter future ("Trouble makes trouble and soon Trouble went poof"). But life doesn't always oblige. "My life was going by. Year. Cake. Year. Cake.// And no circus," she says later, and she can't help acknowledging her students' problems ("-An alcoholic father, a sad-faced mother") or recalling the pet rabbit lost to her carelessness and the cow who will doubtless die from eating barbed wire. Yet she also commemorates rescuing a baby jay and must conclude "even if the world is half bad, it remains/ half-good." VERDICT Empathetic, accessible reading. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.