Sonnets for a Missing Key

Everett (English, Univ. of Southern California) is best known for his novels, especially this year’s James (his retelling of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as narrated by Jim) but also 2001’s Erasure, which inspired the 2023 film American Fiction. But he is a considerable poet as well, with six prior collections of poems to his credit, including 2015’s Trout’s Lie. That said, he’s not an easy poet to read. He has characterized his poetry as experimentation with “pure form” and said in a Paris Review interview that he writes poetry to prove that he can’t. Abstractness mattered less in his previous collections, where his wordplay was often anchored in concrete images. But the poems in this collection, each a page or two long, seldom anchor themselves, and when they do, image and mood are distant and amorphous. These poems are inspired by Chopin preludes and Art Tatum piano solos: the 23 sonnets are named after key signatures, and the other poems refer to musical modes. But for the most part, there’s not enough specificity in the poems to tie them to experience, images, mood, or music in order to make the work feel like more than a mere experiment.