Hail Mary, After Dishes

Ten years ago, Mary Szybist's debut book of poems arrived trailing blurbs from Donald Justice, Jorie Graham, and Robert Hass. She picked up rave reviews and a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and then, for the next decade, no more books arrived. Incarnadine, which finally closes that bracket, is an oddly quiet and disquieting collection and an unlikely, if welcome, answer for that duration. In Incarnadine, Szybist longs for God and longs to long for God and treats her own longing with occasional scorn. The book is a mix of good manners and postmodern invention. At her most outlandish (a poem in the form of a sentence diagram, for instance), Szybist still sounds relatively conventional. At her most conventional, she's up to something strange.