James Thomas Stevens’s exquisite collection of poetry The Golden Book generates its capacious lyric from its “form(s) of encounter” and how these encounters build intimate lyric addresses with fertile syntax and deep innovation; resourcing a grammar until its signification astounds. Stevens’s poems have a keen, sensorial candor, full of a private and conscientious recall: “Single memories or sensory stimuli are sometimes set off, as entire histories.” And then there’s its sentence level where the poems truly are “In like lions, out like lambs.”
—Prageeta Sharma
