Spell

Lauterbach (Or To Begin Again) is a laureled poet who has been awarded, among other things, Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships and has also created collaborative works with other artists, and the clarion, arresting quality of vision that has carried her through is borne out in this work. It could be said of this substantial tenth volume of poetry that it negotiates the failures, or perhaps the multiplicities, of definition: the book concludes with four definitions of the word spell, and the lyrics are punctuated by prose poems in the form of dialogs that talk around and about other key words (sublime, intent, intend, wonder, earth, awe, and so on). But it's equally important to notice that the poet's epigraphs come from John Ashbery and Hannah Arendt, and Lauterbach's serious play as a writer engages Arendt's sober acuity with Ashbery's half-whimsical disjunctions in tone and register.