Place the tip of your tongue in different positions, and you might find yourself pronouncing your Ss like SH. For most of us, that means something about how we speak to and understand each other. For phoneticians, this introduces questions of articulation and apicality. For poet Jean Day however, the term Apicality lends her latest book of poems its name. And while the term Apicality suggests questions about the formation of speech and language, the term also has applicability across many fields. As a result, issues of form and origin hover over the entirety of Day’s latest, fantastic book of poems.

Teetering in a liminal space between a long poem and a consortium of compact lyrical statements, Executive Orders makes use of a kind of ludic legalese intended as a counterpoint to the unilateralism of Donald Trump’s heavy-handed use of executive power. By the same stroke, it broaches broader questions about how the social fabric of our lives relates to the impersonal ubiquity of technology today. By opposing poetry’s negative capability — its capacity to flow against factual uniformities — to the crushing realities of executive legislation, the book maintains a subdued sense of communitarianism. 

Why does defining the writer as a dissident intellectual seem so European, or global, but not American? 

The axiomatics of Victoria Guerrero-Peirano’s first poem in this beautifully crafted, hand-sewn collection instigate a pretty radical shift away from cordoning off textile workers as banner casualties in late capitalism. Or of textile work as polite women’s work. “I leave words” begins the first poem.

The main character of Lola, the Interpreter is not Lola but Hejinian’s mind, and it is a ride not to be missed. Prose but not poetry, not a poet’s novel, not criticism: it is a poet thinking philosophically about the present, in full recognition of how complex that present is.