THE FLY

Jacqueline Waters's fourth collection confronts the ways we push each other around, hoping for a little win, settling for the slow diminishment of our souls. The book’s preoccupations include the vagaries of authority, the tendency to sweep everything under the rug then wonder why the rug's not flat, intergenerational chaos, sudden medical detour, and an ill-advised passion for healing. The tone is sinister, yet amusing, offering one more handhold as we near the end of our ropes: “We can’t have knowing looks / (we’re both as good as dead) / so we have these knowing lines, typing till the clock says stop.”

I can’t exactly tell you how funny I find “Interview,” how moving I find “A Ruse,” how lovely and bewildering I find “What Might Good Be,” or why I keep returning to the writing in this book as if to some deep, wild need. What I can tell you is that I’ve been preoccupied with—or maybe “occupied by” is a better way to say it—the poems of Jacqueline Waters for the past quarter century and that they only get better with time and attention. I do believe they’ll never go away. —GRAHAM FOUST

“But I only love you / because I love / my contempt.” Like happening upon an old porcelain and discovering it depicts cruel, near comical scenes with a great precision, in a style that is pointless to try and place historically, fine China made in America—that’s The Fry. Some if not all of these poems are a song. And the plates the book talks about come from Ikea. These are lines of unmistakable value, in which the antiseptic violence of our homeland makes a cool hard surface—they are relaxed yet unnervingly purposeful, like the way the times are going to do themselves to you no matter what—they don't need (which is why they never asked for) your consent. Jacqueline Waters has always been new to me, these more than twenty years I’ve admired her. An adventurous, diamond mind—her perception remains immaculate, seemingly immune to what it sees and knows. —ARIANA REINES