New Poetry Books That Lean Into Calm and Joy Amid Life’s Chaos

Kuusisto, who teaches at Syracuse University, often takes his cues from Finland, where he spent a year in his childhood and whose poets he’s translated elsewhere (he quotes them here). A memoirist and essayist as well as a poet, Kuusisto has received acclaim for writing about his blindness, as in his 2018 book “Have Dog, Will Travel.” It’s a topic here too, one his verse will not let us forget, though he rarely makes it his only point. His well-traveled life, and his reliance on senses other than sight, suffuse the quiet scenes the new poems construct, outdoors in the snow, “beside the abandoned woodstove,” or indoors under the spell of poetry, another “game best played on the floor,” where “puzzle wish fear and ache/Are what a magician is for.”

by Andrea Ballou

The single lines and isolate sentences in Ballou’s OTHER TIMES, MIDNIGHT (Persea, paperback, $17) look stranded in more ways than one: They follow folk tales’ laments for missing husbands; grief for a lost child; the day-to-day bewilderments of an introvert in a hurried and crowded world; and the poor fit between the supposed wisdom of myth and the hard frustrations of family life.

In a motel, “a soul cries out to me … says it wants to live. Leave. I can’t tell which.” A dreamed, retold fairy tale finds Ballou “contemplating a vast wall of ovens” beside her dog, then morphing into molten salt: Hansel and Gretel meet Lot’s wife. That’s how she looks when she travels — but home fares no better. “Everyone in my house has a ripped face./My job is to re-upholster them.”

The Massachusetts-based Ballou looks back to the past, to other times and other souls, in search of advice, and finds only more challenges: Her stripped-down free verse (think Louise Glück meets Dana Levin) seems always in search of unobtainable answers — perhaps “an ice-age word, or pre-Columbian,/something with feathers on it.” The poetry, as she knows, comes from the looking, from the moving on, “the work of living in the arch itself,” the gateway to some afterlife we can never explore. Decades of writing (and a background in Spanish-language literature) have gone into this laconic and wise first book, where long-delayed second thoughts, long-awaited romance and long-term mourning become the enduring subjects: “Remorse docked her boat,” as Ballou writes, “long ago on my shore.”