Jay Hopler has what musicians call "attack." He enters his poems immediately, and no matter how ironic or strange his sentences become, his voice clamps each phrase to the page with conviction. Here's the beginning of his opening poem, "In the Garden":

                        And the sky!
Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm
Of an empty nursery.

In "The Frustrated Angel," he gives these lines to an otherworldly tormentor much like Henry's infamous "friend" in the Dream Songs:

That's mighty big talk, isn't it, Hopler—coming from
       a man who lives with his mother?

And here's an epigrammatic barb from "Self-Portrait with Whiskey and Pistol":

Maybe if I surrounded myself with prostitutes and
       strippers, my celibacy would feel less like a lack and
       more like an act
Of heroic self-denial.

You begin to get a sense from these passages of Hopler's obsessions, and the idiom with which he embodies them. This is a book about intense solitude, a state which for moments seems an ultimate good, but more often feels like imprisonment. Hopler speaks from a literal and metaphorical garden, haunted by extravagant fantasies of escape, and by the Mother who hovers oppressively but never really appears.

In the best poems, this pull between imaginative departure and chastening containment becomes a formal principle. I'm thinking in particular of the two strongest lyrics in the book, "That Light One Finds in Baby Pictures" and "The Boxcars of Consolidated Rail Freight." Here's how the latter begins:

                                     Those angels of history are
       whispering, again,
That I'm the product of two people who should have
       known
Better.

                                     Now one of them is dying. The
       other is going
Crazy over it. I know—. To this day, there's a space
       behind

My eyes that stays lit like some small-town
       museum's North
Atlantic collection.

I admire how the self-effacing humor of that enjambment into "better" opens into the sincerity of the following sentence, and how that bald statement slides into the strangeness of the museum simile. You can tell that Hopler's at his best when the poems move this dramatically.

His weaker moments come when he replaces such dramatic action with mannerism. Hopler has several stylistic tics. He repeatedly makes past-participial adjectives out of nouns, so that the moon, for example, becomes "vampired." He slides often into a gallows humor that overdetermines and numbs the poems. (Cynicism is the flip side of sentimentality: they both quickly induce then foreclose on feeling). And at times he buys his lush phrasing on the cheap:

Look at the garden: dew-swooned and with fat
       blooms swollen,
With shade leaf-laced between the lemon trees.

In the end, though, I'm grateful for Hopler's raggedness. These days, we're fond of praising first books for not seeming like first books. We're accustomed to faulting work for being "uneven." But who's ever said, "I love that book. It's so even?" There's a volatility in Jay Hopler that promises much more than competence and reliability. And I'm eager to see what that will be.

— Peter Campion