Poetry is the only form I know that punishes speed. Read a novel quickly and you still get the story. Read a poem quickly and you get almost nothing, a blur of line breaks and a vague sense that something happened. The five debuts below are books I read too fast the first time and then went back to, one poem a night, the way they seemed to want.
None of them are loud. All of them are small in the way that a good lens is small. Here they are, in the order I would hand them to a friend.
A Grammar of Small Birds, by Tomasz Wren
Start here. Wren wrote this collection over a single Milwaukee winter while his wife recovered in a hospital room whose window looked onto a stand of bare lilacs. The birds in those branches, sparrows and juncos and a cardinal that sang earliest on the coldest mornings, are in nearly every poem.
Wren was born in Gdansk and teaches English as a second language, and the book is full of grammar treated as something you can hold. In a short poem called "Plural," the speaker watches two sparrows fight over a single seed. "One seed. Two birds. / The lesson says add s. / The lesson has never been hungry."
"My students say true things with very few words," Wren said when I asked how he thinks about compression. "I try to write like the best of them. If I need a big word, I have probably not understood yet what I mean."
The collection closes with "Wren, February," the sonnet he famously drafted 212 times. Read the book in order and save that poem for a morning when you have time to sit with it.
Night Shift, by Celia Amankwah
Amankwah spent nine years answering calls overnight at a 911 dispatch center in Providence, Rhode Island, and Night Shift (Finch & Quill, 96 pages, $16) is built from those hours. The poems are tender, alert and exhausted. They are also funny. One poem is a list of everything the headset has heard her say at 3 a.m.
Her best lines carry the calm of someone trained to stay steady. "Everything I love / has called me once / and asked me not to hang up."
"I wrote most of them on the backs of shift logs during my break," Amankwah told me. "Then I'd copy them out at home before I slept. Half of them I couldn't read. Some of the misreadings were better than the originals."
The Letter Box, by Hollis Tran
Tran inherited a tin box of letters his grandmother wrote but never mailed, each one in a mix of Vietnamese and English. His debut (Common Ground, 88 pages, $17) pairs each letter, reproduced in facsimile, with a poem written in reply. Some poems answer her line by line. Others wander far from what she asked.
The book could have been a gimmick. It is saved by Tran's restraint and by his refusal to translate everything. In "Postage Due," he writes, "She never sent them. / I send everything now. / That is the whole difference between us."
"The letters were her voice," Tran said. "I didn't want to talk over her. I wanted to answer her, the way you would across a table."
"If I need a big word, I have probably not understood yet what I mean."
County Road Hymnal, by June Albers
Albers is a rural mail carrier in northern Minnesota, and County Road Hymnal (Northfork Press, 104 pages, $15) is a book of routes. Every poem is titled with a mile marker. The landscape is flat and white for most of the year, and Albers knows it the way only someone who drives it six days a week could.
The poems are spare and mostly unrhymed, with a hymn's steadiness underneath. "The snow keeps its own mail. / Tracks to the barn. Tracks back. / Somebody is still getting up in the dark."
This is the slowest book on the list, and the one I have returned to most. It rewards being read in the car, parked, with the engine off.
Salt Year, by Priyanka Deshmukh
The last book here is also the most formally ambitious. Deshmukh, a marine biology technician in Galveston, Texas, wrote Salt Year (Northwater Books, 120 pages, $18) as a sequence of fifty-two poems, one for each week she spent monitoring an oyster reef. The weeks add up to a portrait of a coast under pressure, and of a marriage coming quietly apart on shore.
The ambition occasionally strains. A few of the weekly poems feel like entries written to keep the count. But the best of them are startling. "The tide takes back what it lent us. / It keeps no ledger. / It never has to."
"I set myself the rule of one poem a week because I didn't trust myself to write anything without a rule," Deshmukh said. "By week thirty I hated the rule. By week fifty I understood it was the only reason I was still writing."
How to read them
My advice is simple. Pick one of these books and keep it somewhere you pause, the kitchen counter, the car, the nightstand. Read one poem. Put it down. Read the same poem again the next day before you move on.
These are first books, and they have first-book flaws. But each of them was written by someone who paid close attention for a long time, and the least a reader can do is return the favor.
A Grammar of Small Birds by Tomasz Wren (Finch & Quill, 112 pages, $16) is out now.
Critic. Elena writes reviews and essays on poetry, memoir and the craft of the first book.
