Sarah Lang

The Work of Days is a collection of poems that are as captivating and confusing as emotions, dreams or hallucinations. Many of these poems are written in the first person to a 'you,' albeit sometimes it seems the narrator doesn't realize she is addressing anyone when she does so.

There are some poems that reference no one but plants, insects and the weather. Some are collections of conditions or conjunctions while others are collections of actions without subjects.

At her best, Lang's disjunctive syntax and taut, oblique episodes can be hauntingly moving. But she tends to overdo the po-mo alienation; some of the best passages in the book come when she gives her sentences and lines a bit more room to breathe. The Work of Days could be fairly classified as confessional, but there is nothing self-indulgent in the collection – unless you count its unremitting, monochromatic seriousness.

Sarah Lang begins her first book with a witty linguistic bang: "Hibiscus, hibiscus, hibiscus, rolls / of a hip, an eye remembers like a / great flowering (this is my big break)." I'm not sure there's really anything like "a big break" in poetry, but this just sings pizzazz and chutzpah.