The Threatened Everything

Poetry. "The poems in Paula Cisewski's THE THREATENED EVERYTHING take on a teetering, siren-infused world in which 'bullets rip through every modern poem,' and the speaker, like the rest of us, is 'always and forever / on a stairway to a stairway to,' stuck between floors and phrases like an infinitely skipping record. This book is both urban and animal. It inhabits the political realm and a panicked interiority, the elegiac ('This elegy / is for who one man / in a repeating // mirror of men might have been / before violence') and a newlywed bliss that borders on the hysterical ('happy / as a warehouse stuffed with // white umbrellas popped open!'). I am delighted by Cisewski's formal virtuosity and her feverish humor, and I'm scared to death—as one should be—by the accuracy of her apocalypse. 'We gravel-knee our motherland,' she writes. 'We are patriots, Sisters and Brothers, and our country's flag is a gaping beak.' This book's arrival is imperative, urgent. It burns."—Diane Seuss