Beautiful, Safe & Free

Sifting through the linguistic, economic, and cultural detritus of 21st-century America, Douglas Piccinnini's Beautiful, Safe & Free achieves a poetics of intimate alienation, with "new scenery made / by what is missing." These refreshingly unpredictable poems use disjunction and divagation along with repetition and lyricism to arrive at unsettling truths where "living behind a shield of inaction" is revealed as "a life of crime." Whether "here in the leavemealone performance of violence" or in "the fuckyourself future," Piccinnini navigates individual and collective desires--"I imagine myself / through desire," "you must live / by loss of desire," "to live comfortably / yet desire differently"--to confront a life "uncomfortable in love" and "unreasonable in dreams." Embracing both "viral meaning" and "private dreaming," every poem manages to be simultaneously mysterious and revelatory. --Brian Henry