The Police (Omnidawn, 2017)

Daniel Poppick is “assisted by a radiance of bending.” Many of the most beautiful lines show grammar almost breaking up: “For you was sunburnt I are leaving we am buoyed by / Homages…” Bending, buoyancy—the poems have both delicacy and force. “We am” might be a solecism, but it’s also an urgent dream. Reading, we am radiant. “Between us flows a school." BEN LERNER
With mesmerizing dexterity, Daniel Poppick captures a consciousness hived by the augmented realities of contemporary life. As distance collapses into sharable moments, he questions how we can sustain intimacy when we cease distinguishing our somatic experiences from our avatars; how to disrupt when disruption itself is privatized; how to connect when connection itself is privatized? Each poem reads like exquisite comment streams of the mind. Poppick writes with beauty, wit, and compassion. CATHY PARK HONG
“Now I am older, don’t think in words.” Poppick’s poems live up to the claim. Thinking in words might entail articulating orderly, permissible ideas. This is closer to the police’s job, yet who doesn’t have an inner cop? “Thus I am inwardly my police,” he writes. Reminding us of how “unvarious by comparison” ordinary language is, Poppick’s poetry amazes as the result of perceiving in words, full on, riotously. MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
As you near the conclusion of Poppick’s gorgeous collection, having followed the drive of his propulsive grammar through remarkably moving poems that manage wild elaboration with the bite of aphorism, you come upon a speaker, himself on the way to a poetry reading, being pulled over by the police: “You shrugged & I, / A little alarmed / By exposure to a force / Coiled more tightly than my own / Followed him & fixed / Myself in his front seat.” They share a brief and official conversation about the speaker’s vocation, poetry, and “I discerned a muted affection, but will never be certain / As sympathy & contempt often run the same drills / On the field of the face.” This is a collection replete with the vulnerable pathos of possible connections like this one, tense with longing, and bright with tender, brilliant wit that’s turned by the torque of exquisite syntax. This is one of my very favorite new collections. It reminds me why I read poems in the first place. “Remember how you once / Kissed a map / And it was cool and bottomless…”? This book is that kiss. ROBYN SCHIFF
With mesmerizing dexterity, Daniel Poppick captures a consciousness hived by the augmented realities of contemporary life. As distance collapses into sharable moments, he questions how we can sustain intimacy when we cease distinguishing our somatic experiences from our avatars; how to disrupt when disruption itself is privatized; how to connect when connection itself is privatized? Each poem reads like exquisite comment streams of the mind. Poppick writes with beauty, wit, and compassion. CATHY PARK HONG
“Now I am older, don’t think in words.” Poppick’s poems live up to the claim. Thinking in words might entail articulating orderly, permissible ideas. This is closer to the police’s job, yet who doesn’t have an inner cop? “Thus I am inwardly my police,” he writes. Reminding us of how “unvarious by comparison” ordinary language is, Poppick’s poetry amazes as the result of perceiving in words, full on, riotously. MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
As you near the conclusion of Poppick’s gorgeous collection, having followed the drive of his propulsive grammar through remarkably moving poems that manage wild elaboration with the bite of aphorism, you come upon a speaker, himself on the way to a poetry reading, being pulled over by the police: “You shrugged & I, / A little alarmed / By exposure to a force / Coiled more tightly than my own / Followed him & fixed / Myself in his front seat.” They share a brief and official conversation about the speaker’s vocation, poetry, and “I discerned a muted affection, but will never be certain / As sympathy & contempt often run the same drills / On the field of the face.” This is a collection replete with the vulnerable pathos of possible connections like this one, tense with longing, and bright with tender, brilliant wit that’s turned by the torque of exquisite syntax. This is one of my very favorite new collections. It reminds me why I read poems in the first place. “Remember how you once / Kissed a map / And it was cool and bottomless…”? This book is that kiss. ROBYN SCHIFF