I was re-reading Raw Goods Inventory after seeing Emily at AWP earlier this month and have two new favorite poems: “The Toy Divine(s)” and “Less Art, More Monkeys” (in addition to my old time favorites: “Elephant,” “At the Sushi Arcade,” the title poem, and “Even Before Your Elbow Knocked Over the Glass.”)
I’m biased as Emily is friend and close-reader of my own work, but I love the final version of this collection. I read an early version of this manuscript in the fall of 2004 and this final version is tight.
I love Emily’s keen sense of form in every poem, how deliberate the shapes are on each page, the edge to each word and line that often feel as if they could cut you if you’re not careful. And I love how Emily experiments with form across all four sections in the book, fully using the page plane (nothing turns me off more than a book of poems where all the poems sit left-justified in boring blocks) and yet through all these visual and spatial variations, the voice, through all its tonal variations, somehow remains unified. A quality I admire.