The title of this collection says it all. Admonishing the reader to “go figure” for ourselves, it also nudges us to appreciate the curiousness of what we find. Armantrout’s sense of fairness is reflected in the admonition’s bilateral application, as the collection itself enacts its own exhortation, reporting back from the poet’s investigations with the light but rigorous touch of her genius.

While poems are not formally grouped, readers of Armantrout’s previous twenty poetry collections will recognize clusters addressing her distinctive terrain: images from the natural world, challenging segues, shape-shifting words and phrases yielding diverse perspectives on the environment, time, language, contemporary culture, lived experience, and the function of poetry in our fraught national moment. Poems present as modest in scale but soon explode with outsized ambitions. 

Roslyn Orlando’s Ekhō: A Poem in Three Parts gives voice to two unlikely poet-speakers: Ekhō, the Greek nymph famously condemned to repeat the words of others, and Alexa, the artificial voice emanating from Amazon’s popular Echo speakers. Orlando’s first book-length publication, the wildly creative and richly intertextual Ekhō seems aligned with Orlando’s creative and interdisciplinary background: she holds degrees in journalism and arts politics and is currently based in Melbourne, Australia, on Wurundjeri country.

Perhaps you’re like me, and you walk around during the day innocently enough, if with a host of questions about poetry in the back of your mind, and from time to time, when crossing a street, or walking down a long avenue, you pull out them and wonder about them some more. […] James Loop’s Metronome brought these questions to mind, in productive, pleasing ways. Its 43 poems span 118 pages. Its back cover announces that the volume contains poems written over a decade, and so it advertises itself as a sort of selected poetry volume.

Long regarded in the United Kingdom as one of its most distinguished contemporary poets, Robinson has also won critical recognition from venerated Americans of letters. Marjorie Perloff penned a glowing blurb for the back cover of Return to Sendai during the last year of her life: “Peter Robinson has been enchanting us with his quietly meditative poems — poems that prefer to ‘leave the threads dangling’ rather than to provide any sort of closure.