Reduction in Force

In a literary moment when so much lyric poetry seems preoccupied with private experience and ready-made epiphany, Hugo Dos Santos's Reduction in Force is revelatory. It is, yes, an examination of the self, but it performs its review through lenses and landscapes that are rarely utilized in poetry, which is to say the cold and bureaucratized reality of the American corporate world, and the ways that world can affect and pressure the individuals and families who attempt to build their lives under the dominion of those companies. Dos Santos maps the experience of a true believer who must come to terms with the betrayal now inherent in what used to be known as the American dream and work through the humiliation of starting over. He does so in poems that are consistently surprising in content, satisfyingly varied in form and tone, and utterly, winningly, trustworthy to the reader. I haven't seen anything like this book before, and it heralds the arrival of an original poet, with the promise of more originality and excitement ahead. --Anthony Walton