Boxed juice

Chapman channels an electrifying vehemence, a profound insistence on survival. Flowers are spiky and determined; nettles cause visionary pain. Landscapes and cityscapes pulse with beauty and danger. The charge throughout this ever-surprising volume is the threat of an early death for her poet husband. The cancer appears, disappears, returns as the couple has twin daughters, doubling concern and joy. Taut, thrumming, frank, and delving, Chapman's poems reflect days and nights hung in the balance of fear and hope, medicine and faith. They track a voracious and shifting world of towers gleaming and dilapidated, wildflowers in a gulch, a backyard bunny massacre. The poet is a protective Janus with a smiling face for others, a private visage tense with worry. Whether describing Chicago, the ambiance of hospital rooms, a new start in New Haven, or her family's grimly shadowed eighteenth-century home in Tennessee, the anchor for her memoir, Holler (2023), Chapman's language is as sharp and sure as a new scalpel urgently unwrapped on a doctor's tray. Writing with the specificity of a scholar and the intensity of a woman filling many roles while holding everything together for everyone, Chapman embraces life's trials and glories, and tracks the force that flows through thorn and blossom, pit and fruit, the acidic and the sweet.

Near the end of this exuberant sophomore collection, Chapman (Delinquent Palaces) offers herself a divine pardon: "Thus the Lord showed me both ways,/ the austere and the hospitable, are good." Indeed, these poems move between rival modes and moods, by turns word-drunk ("chucking empties in the boondocks,/ from which fireflies still drowse into the grasp") and puritanical ("There is a spirit in me that admits no weakness/ When it sings, the rest of me despairs"). Deepening the book's divides, an extended memoir (written in the third person) bridges two sequences of lyric poems, covering the treatment of her husband's cancer, the poet's experience of IVF, and the birth of twins. At times, the prose delivers flat facts ("When the girls were eight months old, her husband was admitted to the 15th floor with an infernal swelling under his chin, ten out of ten on the pain scale"); elsewhere, it reaches for imagery ("The white sky, blank as blotter paper, absorbed bare branches like aneurysms of ink"). For the most part, though, the book's shifts of genre, tone, and diction successfully cohere. The result is a fitting testament to Chapman's generous imagination. (Oct.)