[ominous music intensifying]

“About this country: who gets to dive and rise / and who gets trampled like the vintage, I still can’t see / the justice” says Teague (Mortal Geography) in one of the many expansive poems in her powerful (and sometimes overpowering) latest. This is classic Teague, using language that’s urgent and direct to capture her anger at the depredations evident in U.S. history and culture, the reassuring lies and earnest mythologizing. One long poem addressing a glib comment Mitch McConnell made about young people rages at his out-of-touch heartlessness and finally concludes, “I think we’re seeing the directions wrong, / or looking in too few. We’re talking stock markets versus aliens when / what we need is fields of real living corn.” Like many of Teague’s poems, which frequently reference her Arkansas/Texas upbringing, “Orange Blossom Special (arranged for Rome’s burning)” offers a disquieting look at nostalgia for the presumed good old days, with a fiddle in an Ozark theater eerily echoing the sound of a train carrying white people to 1940s Florida. “The train that’s not a train / is screeching closer, whistling and wheedling” says one line, just one example of how viscerally she communicates sight and sound.