Incident Names by S.J. Pearce – NWVS #189

S.J. Pearce‘s Incident Names transports us archaeologically: these canny, delightful poems carry the reader through Spain, New York, Venice and the Levant, fluidly traversing centuries and empires. As a scholar and a lover of the text, Pearce makes poems that reconsider what poems can be—these are homages, memorials, wry translations, winking palimpsests, compendia. She finds the red thread connecting translation and intimacy. And while these lyrics vary in form and project, underneath each is a strong attunement to the urgency of memory: to grief, to the violences that mark an individual life or a society, and to the necessity of remembering by way of the written word. And even still Pearce’s poems remain elaborately, dizzyingly fun. This is a collection that beguiles and intrigues, that invites us in and then goads us to explore the texts that form and inform our living.

–Jay Deshpande, poet and educator based in Brooklyn.