The PSA Critics' Page Young poets, essayists, and teachers of poetry review debut and second collections Ben Lytal Priscilla Becker, Internal West Zoo Press, 2002, 64pp, $14.95 A reader may take it for granted that one can bring one's own concerns to whatever configuration of seashells and blank epiphany a poem presents. This is a bad habit, and Priscilla Becker does not allow it. The poems of her debut book, Internal West, often leapfrog imagery, moving straight to the precise, abstract point. "It is only a childish addiction / to drama that makes you call it / death when it is really just / an ordinary broken heart." Yet these aphoristic poems are not dead ends. They perform a mental two-step, starting with the truth and then questioning it— is the phrase "broken heart" not itself melodramatic? Becker's deadpan self-analysis, more challenging than confessional, is at its best when dealing with the "gnarled accumulate" of the ambiguous heart. These poems do not rejoice, they do not linger. They are restless, impatient, and valuable. Brian Henry Sarah Messer, Bandit Letters New Issues, 2001, 68 pp, $14 Part revisionist history, part documentary poetics, part lyric poetry, Sarah Messer's Bandit Letters offers a contemporary feminist perspective on America' s outlaw past. Exploiting such conventions as "Rumor," "Gossip," and "Love Letter" as well as the less traditionally poetic "Brochure" and "Catalogue for Ladies in Disguise," Messer becomes, narrates, and demythologizes outlaws known and anonymous. Here, cross-dressing, like violence, is made to seem commonplace, and women torture themselves with corsets and pessaries to meet conformist standards of beauty. Nothing— the body, identity, the historical record— is stable or safe, a position memorably enacted in the book' s tour de force, "I am the real Jesse James," a suite of ten hallucinatory prose poems in which phrases are recycled and redeveloped, thus presenting ten alternate truths. An unusual and unusually affecting first book. Timothy Donnelly Karen Volkman, Spar University of Iowa Press, 2002, 60pp, $13 Longing begins with the gaze, claimed medieval phantasmologists. By way of the eye, the other's image impresses itself on the lover's spirit, leaving behind a presence that marks the other's absence, a figment whose elusiveness creates desire, daydreams, even hallucinations— the "wishful phantasies" that, centuries later, Freud maintained writers materialized in their work. Throughout Karen Volkman's new collection— the follow-up to Crash's Law, her acclaimed debut— the poet indulges in language's capacity to conjure, capture, and confront, breathing strange new life into the parallelism of classical Hebrew poetry and the alliteration of Anglo-Saxon verse. An exquisitely crafted, erotic tour-de-force in verse and prose, Spar's dense verbal texture isn' t just for show, but determined wholly by the poet's struggle to solidify and retain what slips away, what can' t be possessed. Spar ends: "when late light turns the leaves gold, when the red pine offers its armfuls of snow, we are not hunger and perjure. In that moment (blemish and blossom) we are gaze." Here, with a nod to French writer and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, Volkman admits that a true (and ethical) embrace of the other can only occur in a face-to-face encounter: a shared gaze. It cannot be effected through writing, she knows — even through writing as gorgeous as hers. Emily Moore Saskia Hamilton, As for Dream Graywolf Press, 2002, 68pp, $12.95 As for Dream has everything one looks for in a slender volume of poems— reverie, longing, "the tick of small insects against the lamp-light." Hamilton writes with an almost buoyant precision; after succumbing to the "coagulated dullness" of loss, she is revived by an unexpected twinge: "I felt the cold of the stone floor move up my leg. Sneaky." Hamilton's work, like her subject matter, is as delicate as it is potent. Hers is a poetry of hinges, fish hooks, and flight patterns. A later verse recalls "the weight of the dream I had / in which I kissed him and felt a skittish / animal slip in." The poet is at her best when exploring the specificity of desire; "All it takes is one apology for you to wake up," she writes, "but it has to be the right apology."