Excisions

Out of hospitals, marriage bedrooms, woodland parks and city centers—the vanishing borders between the healthy and the sick—Hilary Plum’s poems emerge hard-edged and fully formed. She is dynamically attuned to the fragility and ferociousness of our attachments to one another, “a long storm of hello.” Densely lyrical and possessed of austere beauty, Excisions recalls the poetry of Jorie Graham, Victoria Chang and George Oppen, but Plum’s voice is her own—flinty, incantatory and undeniable.—Daniel Poppick