[ominous music intensifying] Poems

The candid fourth collection from Teague (Or What We'll Call Desire) depicts memories of her Arkansas childhood. The title, inspired by a caption from a movie Teague watched during the pandemic, captures the speaker's restlessness. Yeats's apocalyptic Rough Beast from his poem "The Second Coming" makes multiple appearances, taking a painting class and listening "to a PSA from Lake America." As Teague takes on gun violence, pollution, greed, and Mitch McConnell, she writes, "We all go swimming in moonlight/ that's really a cow pond: that clay-suck-and-cow-shit squelching the slits/ between our toes like we're a creature evolving from webbed feet/ or back again; duckweed gritty on our t-shirts because the August heat/ of our own fears has become unbearable." She invokes her homeland in all its tacky glory and sordid history, from carnival rides to the Klan: "Hands in the air/ for the Bald Knobbers with their black-horned masks and cutout/ eye holes, who set the fire, who no one mentioned, helped set/ the Ozarks on the tracks of whiteness." The dense and lengthy poem "Mean High Water: An American Gyre" blends Annie Edson Taylor's Niagara Falls barrel plunge ("I/ hoped, she said, to aid myself financially") with glimmers of other near drownings, including the speaker's divorce. With urgency and skill, Teague captures the dangers and disillusionment of contemporary America. (Oct.)

"About this country: who gets to dive and rise / and who gets trampled like the vintage, I still can't see / the justice" says Teague (Mortal Geography) in one of the many expansive poems in her powerful (and sometimes overpowering) latest. This is classic Teague, using language that's urgent and direct to capture her anger at the depredations evident in U.S. history and culture, the reassuring lies and earnest mythologizing. One long poem addressing a glib comment Mitch McConnell made about young people rages at his out-of-touch heartlessness and finally concludes, "I think we're seeing the directions wrong, / or looking in too few. We're talking stock markets versus aliens when / what we need is fields of real living corn." Like many of Teague's poems, which frequently reference her Arkansas/Texas upbringing, "Orange Blossom Special (arranged for Rome's burning)" offers a disquieting look at nostalgia for the presumed good old days, with a fiddle in an Ozark theater eerily echoing the sound of a train carrying white people to 1940s Florida. "The train that's not a train / is screeching closer, whistling and wheedling" says one line, just one example of how viscerally she communicates sight and sound. VERDICT Engaged, propulsive poetry for anyone concerned about U.S culture today.