• Melissa Stein: Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon, 2018)
• Ada Limón: Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015)

Limón: Before buying her book from the publisher’s booth at Wordplay last week, she was only a name to me.

There is a popular trend in the current era to strive for a very informal, conversational style. When done poorly, it’s insipid, self-indulgent, and therapeutic, like reading someone’s diary. I found her best poems to be all the more powerful precisely because of how deftly she employed a quotidian voice that at times almost verged on clumsy, only to tighten up into a musical clarity all the more surprising.

I did find the collection to be a bit uneven, but that’s not remarkable; I find most poetry collections uneven.