Books

Autrey’s poems seem to take great pleasure
in naming the world, (as in these beautiful lines: “tumbling clouds of goose down: / from cumulonimbus to cumulus / to the cirrus called mare’s tails”), as they do so building a language of the concrete, a language of heft and act. What do they lift then? To me, it seems they attempt to lift a self, to put it back together in the “undignified process / of bringing the past up to the present.” But often, the vision is bleak, for it’s not the past, in the end, that haunts these poems, but the impending future. As he writes in his book’s title poem, “Our Fear,” “We fear / Not the return of the repressed, / But a future, in which we are scanned like a text.”

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- Jordan Zandi