The Ghost Ship

In her fifth collection of poems Mary Kinzie continues to extend her formal reach, drawing out her lines with a quiet daring that reveals an elegiac thread in the most conversational cadences (a good example is her long poem "Cilantro," about erotic attraction). And while continuing to explore complex forms (quatrain, sonnet, ode, sestina) and to find her voice in syllabics, alcaics, and varieties of free verse, she also tries to bring unaccustomed subject matter into her ken. To call her themes merely "domestic" or "personal" is to fall short of the sense of elation and dread with which even…