It was more than a little surprising when a slam poet won the 2005 National Poetry Series. The NPS does not often slam. So when Patricia Smith, four-time individual champion at the National Poetry Slam got the NPS nod, both Slam and Series worlds did a double take. After all, in 2000, Harold Bloom made his infamous proclamation in the Paris Review that Slam was “the death of art.” What’s changed since then?…

The body and its ailments is a recurring theme that comes up not in reference to the poet himself, but those close to him (father, wife). It is not only in this sense that these are poems of the body; the poems are deeply rooted in the physical – they are rooted in being…

When we read Leigh Phillips's poems we are reading more than poems. We are reading a person's nerves. We, like the men behind liquor store counters in Phillips's first poem, come to know the speaker through her lyric meditations on living in the wake of losing something beautiful. These poems are deeply pained, though there is something at the bottom of it all, something redeeming about the act of exposing. “Ask me about the time I was angelic in 2006, and I'll tell you where she touched me. Ask me about the aurora borealis.” At the center of these poems there is a belief in transformation through telling, through bearing witness to ones own pain there can be rebirth. Phillips sings dark, haunted songs that fall asleep on trains and wear language like skin. Poems that dream and drink. Poems humming electric that spark and pop when you touch them.

Sophie Klahr's poems at once are bustling with noise and eerily quiet. “Unimaginable:     the dull florescence,/ canned laughter, the hush.” They take place in hospitals, living rooms, bus stops. With disarming intimacy and immediacy, these poems are “fluent in emergency,” haunted by addiction and irreconcilable distances between lovers. There is directness in Klahr's plain yet musical language that serves her material well: “this is the living room. this is the moon. this is us kissing; that’s us in the mirror. that over there? is new jersey.”

There is also at times a certain sad, bone-dry humor. In an emergency room looking for a lover whose location will not be disclosed to her, the speaker hears children discussing Iron Man:  “Iron Man can he can fly, he has guns, he can turn/ into whatever he needs” and then thinks: I could turn / / into my life, that machinery, away from you.” In another poem Klahr writes: “The word Bipolar tells me about penguins.” This humor is a balm, but barely. More than anything, it exhibits a sense of control over this difficult, but compelling material.