City Lights Books (paperback, 03/24/2020)

With her alert, ruminative third book, Little Hill, Alli Warren raps on the rampart to sound out gold. Here a stud, here a hollow, here a squeak. Seven poems of surprising observation and abundant generation--love poems, political poems, nature poems interchangeable--pendulate between acceptance of and bemusement with our present state. Their hands-in-pockets speaker looks upon the horizonless, junked tree lawn of today’s Everycity to find awesome both the wild mustard and the delivery drone. (“I stick my nose between the rusty links to get at the new jasmine.”)

Promissory notes patronize this book, as do green juices. Blotted hearts and chalky plastic. Noxious waters. Baskets of light. This book presents our contemporary life “as the blue sky gray sky blue,” as a yo-yoing of beautiful, arresting uncertainty. But, by the end, it earnestly requests that we “let this life be more than / An apparatus for producing an ever-greater quantity / Of feelings, of shoes.” And before we can grant allowance, Warren reaches out to remind us “there is nothing remarkable without you to see it with.”

--Alexander Moysaenko