JACKHAMMER LULLABY

Sound propels the words in Albanese’s looping collection of poetry about poetry.

If there’s a through-line that connects one poem to the next in this collection, it’s the work’s aural textures, which “silently splatter the pitter-patter” throughout an eclectic array of verses. The collection opens, like a deck of tarot cards, on the “fool, the tool,” who is the wayfaring guide into poems that often deal with crises of faith, literature, and the shock of current events. The focus on sound keeps the collection coherent. (In one example, the phrase “mooning, sunning, stunning planets” rattles the reader from celestial space to celestial space.) The collection, which is interspersed with photographs of manuscript drafts of the poems, is also about the process of writing. In “David,” about the Biblical hero “whose s(words) slay giants,” the author re-imagines the title character as a poet and not a slingshot-wielding warrior. Albanese’s playful “s(words),” which yokes together the text on the page with martial combat, illustrates his lively and compelling attunement to language. But Albanese occasionally falters, leaning into vague language and abstractions rather than concrete imagery, relying on a much too-open “language of possibility” that, paradoxically, doesn’t really say anything. Additionally, the topical poems at the end of the book (including one about the Covid-19 pandemic) feel out of place in a collection that’s mostly meta-poetic, as if they’ve been shoehorned in to make the work more autobiographical (“we were told this was best / we were sold on this test // experts know better”). When the book is clearly and consciously about writing, guided by sonic reverie, it works beautifully—but too often, Albanese gets distracted by an abstraction too lofty or contemporary for the assemblage to feel totally coherent.

A meta-poetic collection that occasionally loses focus.