Almost Invisible consists almost entirely of paragraph-long prose poems—there’s just one piece, the poem-within-a-poem of “Poem of the Spanish Poet,” that deviates from that form at all. I like prose poems, generally, the way they sometimes could almost be called short-short stories, and I like these prose poems, the way that in bite-sized pieces they blend humor and nostalgia and uncertainty. I like the vagueness of some of these poems, like “Bury Your Face in Your Hands”, with its images of wind and snow and haze, with its sense of being adrift. I like “Anywhere Could Be Somewhere” for its radical sense of uncertainty, which manages to be ominous and funny at once, in the voice of a speaker who doesn’t know where he/she comes from. Throughout, Strand has a knack for striking images, striking lines, like: “The empty heart comes home from a busy day at the office” (15).
Probably my favorite poem in the book is “The Everyday Enchantment of Music”, the cadence and pace of it, and how well it fits with the conceit/images of a thing becoming something becoming something else.
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