GLR September-October 2024

the lively Dallas theater scene. He’s an astute critic, a writer of plays and performance pieces, and an award-winning presenter of solo work. Soden’s pacing is dramatic as lines move seam lessly within and against loose verse structures. Succinct, clear, colloquial American speech, uttered with Soden’s wild verve, ensures readers’ identification with their own lives. The poems in Tempting God, small marvels of lyric narra

spontaneous and speakable—Yeats’ dictum that a line of poetry should “seem a moment’s thought” comes to mind. Nothing in these poems is overwrought or strained. I didn’t know how much I craved this book before I’d read it. It will stay with me, like the body in Leuzzi’s poem “Fog Machine”: “The body’s edges are/ erased/ reconstructed once the smoke has cleared.”

tive, take us on a tour of queer encounters, begin ning with the life-changing, unabashed delight of a first erotic experience with another boy. Sex— offered or withheld, soul-stirring or repellent— serves these poems as a lens, a language, a catalyst. Soden has an outsider’s keen eye and gift for appreciating the nonconforming and unex pected, and the speaker’s quiet victory in becom ing himself is implicit in compassionate portraits of others who resist easy categorization. Soden is a marvelous poet whose books de serve more attention than they’ve received. I love the generous spirit that flows through Tempting God, above all in the compelling self-portrait that emerges, of one who experiences mercy and a kind of grace in surrendering to life over and over. In the last words of the title poem: “How could I not?/ How could I not?” I N T ONY L EUZZI ’ S fourth book of poems, Fog Notes , mystery and clarity go hand in hand. What does language know of our dreams and figments and flashes of clear seeing? These are poems of rare freshness: nothing in them is predictable. Im ages are precise, vivid, immediate. From “Urban Haiku”: “Trophy from tonight’s wet amble:/ dented vinyl infant head. Its blue/ un daunted eyes alert/ in trammeled pachysandra.” Such images enter us with the weight of their presence. But the poems offer no answers, expla nations, or wrap-ups. Elegant, spare, unembell ished, some with elliptical leaps within and between lines, these are not erasure poems; there are no tricks or clever evasions, no hidden essays, no ads for the emotions. They are more query than certainty. Amid sly jokes, dreams, enigmas, and notes on the misdirection of particular words and ideas, runs a thread of loss. Some of these poems end with a dash, a question mark, an ellipsis, or no punctuation at all, but even those that close with a period seem to leave the poem open, refusing forced solutions—as if still vibrating at the fre quency they have caused us to hear. Leuzzi’s notes at the end of the book are gen erous in sharing part of his playful compositional process, which includes his invention of “dimin ishing sonnets,” his invitation to friends to send him random numbers which became the basis for syllabic patterns, and poems formed from mon degreens, the words we make mishearing familiar texts recited by rote. Despite the rigor behind the poems’ structures, their language and syntax seem

Pearl Bar, Cinco de Mayo. Cherry Heering, Singapore slings. Gin-drunk, hungover, trembling. You kept my freedom rings and I wasn’t brave enough for anything, to ask for them back, to do more than stroke your hair with pretend-stray fingers. Amaretto sours. Pink neon cheering GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS and PLEASE DON’T DO COKE IN THE BATHROOM. I take too long to wash my hands, scrunch beach-tangled curls. We are on our quest tonight for queer joy, an older couple dance a fixed box-step in all seriousness while the DJ plays “Truffle Butter.” You’re pretty but in the words of the novel I didn’t dare to touch . A hundred women twerk to Nikki’s verse. Cutoff jeans, rhinestone platforms, vampire femmes in black bodycon; butches, trans guys in a cautious huddle, studs deploy eye contact wearing exactly whatever they wore to work that day. We’re frozen, English teachers in a corner doing involuntary sociology. My arm goes numb. Useless lesbians scoffs my friend. But why rush. Only the impetus of your eyeshadow, the impulsive curve of your smile. Only me speeding home at 2 am, screamsinging Taylor, madly hemorrhaging cash, taste of a cold preserved maraschino still flavoring my breath. At the slumber party I said are we drunk enough to make out yet and she sagely answered if you have to ask the answer’s no. So we didn’t. We don’t. Your haori flapping capelike in the wind. When there’s skin in the game there’s even more ways it can explode. Am I hideous, a hag, or something worse. My first college girlfriend gave me those rainbow rings, they’re from 1992, they’re important, we slow danced to Melissa Etheridge and the whole old universe stopped inside a heartbeat. I need you to know just how difficult I am now, pointed and new; battered into fragile is this thing you hold

lately, cupped in your warm capable hands.

JSAL OWE

TheG & LR

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