Now You’re the Enemy by James Allen HallThe University of Arkansas Press, 2007

Most of these poems center on, or circle around, the speaker’s mother. “I maul her into memory,” the first poem says, but warns us, too, that “no story is true” (p 3). There is strain and violence, violence against the speaker’s mother, and then her responding violence against the world. I think my favorite of these poems is “Portrait of My Mother as the Republic of Texas,” which is ballsy and funny, a way to capture an outsize figure, super from the first phrases: “After my mother won independence in 1836,/she dysfunctioned as her own nation,” then continuing with twists and perfect turns of phrase (p 5). I like “A Fact Which Occurred in America” lots, too, the blending of the personal—the fifth grade teacher who “kept saying We lost, we lost” about the Civil War, the boy kissing another boy in the trees behind the playground—with larger cultural histories, and with the struggle between those who have power and those who don’t (and how that struggle can end up pitting those without power against each other, too) (p 14). “Parthenogenesis” is another pleasing poem, with its blend of Homer and beauty pageants, its juxtaposition of “omen-eyed” Cassandra and Miss New Jersey (p 22). The six sections of “Portrait of My Mother as Victorine Meurent” are excellent, too, and not just ’cause I’m often a sucker for poems about paintings: I love the clear images of these, the imagined thoughts of artist and model, the way that these poems, like others in the collection, play with power dynamics: here is the artist fixing his model in paint; here is his model, walking away. The collection’s final poems, all of which involve difficult love, are satisfying, poignant without melodrama: I liked “We Exult in Your Pain,” and “The Enemy,” and “Naming the End,” and “Love the Shattered Thing.” (I liked this whole collection much more, on re-reading it, than I did after reading it for the first time. Maybe I over-poetried in April, and needed the break of reading a novel and a few issues of The New Yorker as breathing-space, before more poems.)