Pure Product

In his second book of poems, Jason Guriel cuts a dazzling figure-whip-smart, charismatic, with a mischievousness always eager to play for more serious stakes. Guriel's way of seeing the world is low-key and sly: he tries to show us the big picture by enumerating all the small ones-what he calls "the way tiny things / can't help being, next / to nothing, something". Although a zealous celebrator of ordinariness, his tightly-turned lines have the courage of their own spiky oddity.

The poems in Pure Product celebrate the purity of complicated feelings distilled to crisp expression, a pure poetry true to the impurities of life. This is a formidable collection.