May 17, 2021
The rich fourth collection from Ossip (The Do-Over) finds wonder in quotidian experiences and objects that populate the speaker’s daily life: “the black T-shirt,” “small cat on the bed,” and the “tablets” that glow. Ossip juxtaposes traditional poetic forms with visual ones that use the page as a canvas. Despite their aesthetic variety, the poems are unified by a shared investment in perception and the boundary between the self and world. She writes in “”: “Saw piles of unimportant objects; all the sentiments—/ empathy gentler than anger; anger better than complacence./ I cut clear through.” In the title poem, Ossip travels across the country with her daughter, offering brilliant and lyrical insights throughout: “Independence is an outmoded/ even dangerous concept/ but the three of us go see/ the fireworks on the river.” For Ossip, wonder is a “baroque pearl” that emerges from the speaker’s intellectual dramas and upheavals. While impressive in its thinking and its formal dexterity, certain elements of craft may feel familiar to readers, particularly as the poet delves into the store of tropes associated with writing from a place of amazement. That said, this collection is appealing in its perspectives, subjects, and formal gifts.
July 1, 2021
In a brief essay called "Why I Write," Ossip (The Do-Over) suggests that writing poetry "[is] an intense mode of paying attention via (marvelous, delicious) words." If this fourth collection of poetry shows nothing else, it confirms Ossip's feel for words and their denotative and connotative meanings. Most of these poems are made from words cleverly arranged around an everyday event, as in the title poem, "July," recorded as daily entries about a road trip from Minnesota to Florida that the poet took with her daughter. Ossip's lines are suffused with repetition, and the best poems build to a paradoxical statement that takes the poem out to the reader. "Chayote," one of the best, is a shaped poem that consists of a history, description, and definition of the gourd; as the lines build, Ossip extends her discussion to people ("Like all fruits of the earth including ourselves, chayote / is the subject of legends and myths, probably false"), thereby creating a metaphor to encompass both plants and humans. The poem ends in paradox: "but the truth / like any shape we try to make, / is always, always strange." VERDICT Figurative language, especially alliteration, repetition, and metaphor, races through these pages like the balls in a pinball machine, gathering energy and grace. For a wide range of readers.--C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD
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