Book Reviews: 'Yearn,' Rage Hezekiah, and 'What Happens Next Is Anyone’s Guess,' Carol Potter 

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• Carol Potter | Rage Hezekiah

With the number of books in print increasing every year, book awards play the vital role of highlighting volumes that otherwise could elude notice in the ongoing avalanche of publications. New releases may get a brief spate of attention, but books stay in print and circulation only because readers keep passing them around, booksellers and librarians recommend them, and teachers assign them. A prize can lift an excellent book into view, and being in the neighborhood of the winner as a "finalist" can elicit the curiosity that draws more readers.

On May 6, the 2022 Vermont Book Award in poetry — chosen by a jury of local writers, readers, editors, librarians and booksellers — went to Bianca Stone's What Is Otherwise Infinite. While Seven Days reviewed Stone's book in January 2022, the short list for the award alerted us to two other notable poetry collections: Yearn by Rage Hezekiah and What Happens Next Is Anyone's Guess by Carol Potter.

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• Yearn by Rage Hezekiah, Diode Editions, 72 pages. $18.

Hezekiah is the associate director of academic and international student services at Bennington College and the author of two previous collections, Stray Harbor and the chapbook Unslakable. Before being named a Vermont Book Award finalist, Yearn was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.

Yearn is largely retrospective, as poem after poem summons and reenacts the careening, unapologetic chaos of youthful sensuality: the mischief and menace of drugs or the sway of eros, bodies combining by choice or impulse. In "Remembrance," Hezekiah recalls "how / a teenage heart ravages— / renders you helpless."

Most of the poems in Yearn are slender, taut as a stretched cord, and each arrives at completion with an abrupt finality. Along the way, the collection may feel more like a set of individual pieces placed one by one than a developing, deepening sequence. The thematic similarities among poems are very noticeable — repetitive, even obsessively so, as if the poet's aim is to emphasize the centripetal self-centeredness of youth.

In these poems, sensations are sacramental and danger revelatory, but risks may have consequences. There are poems about lust that are more likely to jolt than titillate a reader, and there are elegies for the casualties. Looking back from a still-perilous vantage in "Capricorn Season," the poet writes, "I haven't learned / not to vibrate with want, / ... I want only this— / to be insatiable."

Then, in the collection's third and culminating section, a steady lover is introduced. A poem called "Married Sex" describes allowing for, tending and even scheduling a more settled erotic pleasure: "We are young enough, / our bodies alert. Yes, please, / I want to have sex. Let's / mark the calendar. Let's shower." The book's final poem, "Poem for My Uterus," is a somber, measured expression of desire to be a vessel for birth: "you // worried carafe ... sweet doomed hovel // show me ... what you need ... to make a life."

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• What Happens Next Is Anyone's Guess by Carol Potter, Beyond Baroque Books, 122 pages. $18

The urgency of Hezekiah's title Yearn has finally shifted, from the raw wanting of someone "barely twenty" to the wholehearted, deliberative longing of a potential parent. The last poems in this book are different in tone and shape, perhaps anticipating ones yet to be written.

Carol Potter grew up on a dairy farm in Connecticut, resided for years in western Massachusetts and then in Los Angeles, and now lives in the Northeast Kingdom. The author of five previous books of poems, including Some Slow Bees (2015), winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize; and Otherwise Obedient (2007), she teaches in the low-residency MFA program of Antioch University Los Angeles and at Community College of Vermont, and works as a writing coach and manuscript editor. Her new book won the Pacific Coast Poetry Series award from its publisher, Beyond Baroque.

In What Happens Next Is Anyone's Guess, Potter's poems have a jaunty stride, and she riffs like an improvising musician with rhymes and boomeranging repetitions. Listen to this, from "There Being a Dank Cellar":

Many of Potter's poems employ logical prose phrasing and syntax, and they proceed like narratives, but they resist obvious outcomes, instead veering — as dreams do — into zany chases with unforeseen swerves. There's a long, wild tradition of poems that aim to show how our routine nighttime hallucinations move, but Potter doubles the effect: In her poem "Some Details & Procedures," she describes a dream inside another dream.

These poems are frequently funny, and the crux — the point of maximum passion or poignancy — is usually in the midst of a poem instead of at the end, creating an uncanny (and unusual) effect that propels a reader from each piece to the next one.

This book offers a story, that of a smart, alert, articulate woman on the cusp of finding herself even as she's seen as "older"; one predicament after another reminds her that life won't go as planned.

Some of the poems in What Happens Next Is Anyone's Guess are verse and some are prose, but in Potter's hands, these two modes differ less from each other than they would in those of many writers. Throughout the book, regardless of the lineation, Potter plays with syncopated rhythms and syllabic echoes. She's made a panegyric in praise of unpredictability, and her book's title is the best possible evocation of its spirit.

While neither of these collections got the prize, the Vermont Book Awards' poetry jury has provided a path to two fine volumes that ought not be overlooked.