POETRY

Just About Anything: New and Selected Poems

Carnegie Mellon Univ. (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series). Mar. 2025. 128p. ISBN 9780887487132. pap. $22. POETRY
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Aaron’s (Journey to the Lost City) latest collection offers more than 50 new poems and a sampling of pieces from his three earlier books. Nearly all the poems record the darting, unpredictable motions of thought and the failure of logic to explain the mystery of human consciousness. Look at lines from “The Mongols,” for example: “who and what a person truly is / has always been anybody’s guess.” Aaron demonstrates how the mind’s limitless powers of travel and transformation can surface anytime; walking a dog or cooking pasta will suddenly give way to a poem that takes readers “past the borders of algebra and helium” (from the poem “Ashes”) and into worlds where numbers grow into Godzilla-like monsters or the landscape flickers with blue lightning. Deceptively conversational, Aaron’s poems frequently take metaphysical turns, as in “The Obvious”: “From a standpoint of pure reason, / the obvious is incomprehensible, so it’s hard to know / whether meaning anything has to do with meaning anymore.”
VERDICT Poised at the threshold of surprise, Aaron’s poems relax into a kind of domestic surrealism that’s both insightful and humorous, yet immediately recognizable, “asking / questions no one can answer / but asking anyway.”
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