Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, and: Eve's Red Dress, and: The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, and: Storm Damage (review)

A poet's first book, for the reader as well as the writer, is an act of discovery and documentary. These four books are all debut collections. They represent a cross section of sensibilities and are remarkable for their sharp differences, each with a highly individuated landscape and vernacular.

A sampler of verbs from the first poem of Patrick Rosal's Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive includes: "suck," "spit," "chase," "snuck," "bust," "slapped," "cracked," "swiped," "buzzed," "danced." If verbs carry the story, Rosal's hold the mother lode. His syncopated syntax and ripped-from-the-heart riffs complete the job. Rosal creates a migratory geography with his posse of Filipino B-boys, though there are several odes to the literal landscapes from the author's boyhood in New Jersey. Fistwork and fractures, barrooms and beltways seem unlikely settings for tenderness, but Rosal draws tenderness out of them. The surface of his poems offer a nod to traditional lyric poetry (i.e. a regular attention to the lefthand margin), but words bolt from their frames with the engines of sound and image. Equally at home mixing text with white space, Rosal uses columns of words and lines in tiers to wring a fresh sound or wrest silence from the page. As a denizen of spoken word poetry, he takes great liberty with capitalization and punctuation, omitting periods entirely; the words rush their lines as if too urgent to pause to change gears. A capital letter indicates a shift rather than a stop, often in the middle of a line.

There's a heady dose of violence and controlled rage in this collection. In "Nine Thousand Outlines," the setting implies a gang rape, where the victim, "a contraption of wings," attempts to escape from a story that begins, "in the armpit of a god."

When I say I was once a boy who became a wolf who became a crow who turned to salt I mean I've become a man somehow without remembering that girl: stork- awkward and pale When I say the boys are my friends I mean all it takes is one of us startled into quickness: a twitch of the hip the others follow and the girl - a contraption of wings- stumbles for the nearest door

The body is one of Rosal's staging grounds. He tempers his swagger with a startling and original use of metaphor, insisting the music in the line hum in the body with the kick of its song. Somewhere between the "bashing" and "acts of contrition" there's a third more joyful and celebratory voice as found in "Citrus City." Here the speaker devours an orange en route to see his lover. He examines what it is to be "naked against the city air/(eight million breaths/at any given moment)":

I look into the eyes of Manhattanites who look me in the mouth       and I think: perhaps she tastes the same tart under her tongue and maybe she will head straight for a fruit stand and buy a navel to eat on the street too

Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive has grit, music, and heart. The street persona casts its author as a Young Turk, but more than that, this persona unmasks a notable newcomer.

Sassy and suburban, the New Jersey of Diane Lockwood's first collection, Eve's Red Dress, reads as another country entirely from Patrick Rosal's. Lockwood favors a different bevy of tropes: farm stand; diner; laundry room; therapist's office. Her language, precise and direct, offers a clear and centered narrative voice. The closing stanzas of the first poem in her collection, "Eve Argues Against Perfection," sets the pace for what to expect from her garden of Eden:

I ate that apple because...