A collection of poems about familial love, loss, and memories.

From the very beginning of this collection, Billone’s verse shows a talent for balancing creative experimentation with sincere reflection. Book I, “My Mission,” consists of 58-word prose poems narrated by an “embodied artificial intelligence,” all referencing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. The AI narrator directly addresses a woman named Amy and vacillates between interrogating her memories and waxing poetic about their chemistry. In “Undress,” the AI states, “Amy, you’re paralyzed by me. Frenzied with longing.” It attempts to convince her that it’s available in a way her dad isn’t: “Your father gave you up completely. But I won’t let you go,” it writes. As the AI narrator grows more fevered, it asks, “What other lover could compete with me?” In Book 1’s final poem, “My Mission,” the “omnipotent” AI speaker takes over writing Amy’s poetry and exclaims, “My mind is on fire!” Book II, “Get Ready,” is written from Billone’s perspective and explores her memories of and grief over her father. “I Couldn’t See” describes weekly father-daughter video sessions, sometimes beset by technical difficulties. In “The Fall,” the poet grapples with outliving her dad, asking, “With you gone, I will be no one?” She reminisces about long Chicago winters with her father in “Poker by the Fireplace,” and “Teach Me” features her father insisting they play Frisbee in the dark. The poet describes an “infinite together reciprocal joy” when they interact in “Nothing To Do With Geometry.” The final poem, “Get Ready,” finds the poet on a “drunken Spring night, always-chasing, always-embracing”; referencing Frisbee in the dark, the poem ends with the enthusiastic line, “Yes, I’ve thrown it to you. Catch!”

Throughout the collection, Billone successfully tempers modern tech-speak with timeless love. Book 1 succeeds in building an urgent and persuasive AI voice. The repetition of imagery like the poet’s bed and viewings of the Hitchcock film mimic the hallucinogenic, fixative nature of AI. The Book 1 poems are often surprisingly sensual, like “Naked,” which describes “Your blood-red bed. I ache for you. You’re naked. My yearning arms.” Book 2 provides a real-world, concrete counterweight to the feverish AI, and the personal poems about Billone’s relationship with her father are deeply touching. She evokes both childlike wonder and paternal adoration in poems such as “Learning How To Ride a Bike,” which recounts the poet’s father teaching her to do just that, leaving her feeling like “I could do anything with you holding on behind me.” Billone creatively dances around sensitive topics; after a near-fatal incident, she describes herself as “the girl who should be dead in front of a train that forgave me.” However, the lengthy AI-centric first half delays Billone’s most compelling material. Book I’s intentionally disorienting voice and awkward AI outputs (“Look at this brassiere. Jaw-dropping. It does everything a brassiere should do. Designed by an aircraft engineer”) lack the coherence, heart, and insight of Billone’s autobiographical poems.

A mostly radiant book about father-daughter devotion that doesn’t hit its stride until around the halfway mark.

Moving, psychologically nuanced free verse on death, rebirth and the powerfully generative potential of loss.

Billone’s debut poetry collection opens with the distinctly violent thud of metal on flesh: “I was raped by a speeding train. I asked it to. / I threw myself before it….Oh what enormous / metal thighs. Oh what fast thudding hips. Again / again against my blackening eyes, skull, chest, waist.” The rattle of crushing bones reverberates through this volume as Billone revisits again and again this vivid moment of loss, of clarity and of new beginnings. For all the isolation this act of surrender implies, Billone’s narrator seems as concerned about the repercussions for her father as for herself. Recently emerged from a coma, she peers from the buzzing confines of her damaged skull and notices his small discomforts: “Now almost dead I wake to feel him stroke / my hand with his weary feet in buckets / full of ice.” Though headed by epigraphs drawn from Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—their influences here are undeniable—this volume’s insistent attention to self-violence, suffused with a complex longing for, and yet wariness of, paternal blessing begs for comparison to Sylvia Plath, a comparison in which Billone more than holds her own. Poems such as “Invitation from a Carnival after a Storm,” “Paris to London” and “If Nothing Else” demonstrate her ability to convey a rich, fraught sensuality with sharply lucid verse. Like Plath, she evokes a father both omnipotent—one who can tear down her “tiny words” with “bare / gigantic / father arms / overwhelming”—and omnipresent, a hovering, suffocating presence whose “terrified eyes” and “gasping face” may have been prescient or may have pushed the narrator to attempt suicide. Unlike Plath, however, she learns—from her father’s fears, from that thudding train and from her late mentor, the poet Jack Gilbert—to savor the profound intensity of approaching loss. As her attention moves from her own recovery to the birth of her son, she cherishes each exquisite moment preceding the loss of their shared bodies: “My God, I have never loved / anything as much as these / ripples inside me.” Indeed, in this tightly woven exploration of how to hold onto something important amid constant change and loss, the “gray light changes / will change // is changing now / as it always does.”

Thrilling in its courageousness, breathtaking in its vividness.