Other Beasts

From the first sumptuous poem—featuring a protagonist who, while running at night, thinks of her body as a nocturnal bloom—this collection immerses readers in the compelling voice of Sarah Corbett. The first half of this new volume is devoted to poems that re-create scenes from a youth haunted by trouble, but redeemed by a strong attachment to the beauties of nature, bravely eschewing lightness and irony for a passionate and intensely physical response to life. The latter half moves away from personal history and focuses on in-depth and often scary narratives of other lives, while closely identifying with survivors of trauma. In the long poem “Testimony” she inhabits the voice of a woman at the center of the murder investigation in which her partner was killed. Another sequence, “Cuttings,” weaves a week’s worth of international press clippings together, thereby creating an alternately horrible, sad, funny, and odd tapestry of events.