Leaning Into the Infinite

Poetry. The ambitious poems of Marc Vincenz don't fit into any poetic scene or aesthetic camp I can name--he is an internationalist, and his work mixes far-flung flavors: a little Hart Crane, a little Italo Calvino, a little Pavese...possibly a little Vallejo? These poems don't stand still, but rocket around, through tones that range from the highly romantic to the ironic to the analytic. They incorporate the vocabulary of chemistry, anthropology, and ecology--and marry it to flamboyant verbal stylistics. Vincenz seems unafraid of being exotic or abstruse, but his poetry is also soundly grounded in a recurrent emotional urgency, and by returning with great plainness to the irrefutable pain of the human condition. --Tony Hoagland