Station Zed

Sleigh follows two award-winning volumes of poetry (Space Walk and Army Cats) with another strong collection focused on mortality: "death's in my face/ when I look at it at just the right angle." The book's title is a Nazi joke and an existential one; its impressive first poem superimposes the Scotch ballade "Mary Hamilton"—about the tragic beheading of a queen's servant—on an impending car crash in contemporary Queens, NY. As an improbable stag suddenly appears through heavy snow, the speaker confronts his imagined demise: "I'm sitting behind the wheel/ of our mutual desire/ when the heel comes off her shoe/ on the Parliament stair/ and lang or she cam down again/ she was condemned to dee." A Hunter College professor and self-professed thrill seeker who has served time as an apprentice war journalist, Sleigh anchors this collection with a war sequence modeled on the travel diaries of Basho, alternating poems with prose ruminations. In "Global Warming Fugue," the poet resigns himself to watching the world as "Mr. Fussy," who observes that "Cyclops eats his men,/ caught between the monster and his own self-image/ entrapped like greenhouse gasses/ that have no place to escape to."