WHAT WAS IT FOR

By Adrienne Raphel

103 pp. Rescue Press, paper, $16.

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In a letter to his student John Bartlett in 1914, Robert Frost wrote, “Remember that the sentence sound often says more than the words.” In her debut collection, Raphel makes the playful most of sounds, with the acrobatics of her diction and syntax absorbing as much attention and providing as much pleasure as her actual content. In the words of the poet Cathy Park Hong, who selected Raphel as the winner of the Black Box Poetry Prize, she “takes Victorian nonsense verse into the 21st century.”

Indeed, poems like “An Owl” call to mind the absurdity and melancholy of Edward Lear: “O I wish I could go so far down in the ocean— / But woe for these wings and these so many feathers! / Sallow and slow in their damp altogethers.” Others, like “Henrietta House,” resemble edgy spells and evoke Gertrude Stein in their erudite nonsense: “Henrietta, so pathetic, / Palpitating neurasthenic, / Barcelona antiseptic.”

Made cohesive by their delightful if perplexing Mother Goose-meets-John Ashbery vibe, these poems are fun and pretty, yet also postmodern and mysterious. Raphel reanimates and vivifies the idea of magic words — incantatory and enchanting.

HOTHOUSE

By Karyna McGlynn

83 pp. Sarabande, paper, $14.95.

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McGlynn’s first book, the fabulous (and fabulously titled) “I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl,” proved that she belonged squarely in the Gurlesque, a loose group of female poets who — combining the burlesque and the grotesque — approach their femininity in a campy way, skewering gender stereotypes. Now, in her glittery, screwball second collection, McGlynn continues to play with the dark comedy afforded by this girly kitsch. “So you want to know where I live?” the title poem asks. “Come here, love. We’ll circle the walls / with my big rococo key & look for a way in.”

The book is divided architecturally — bedroom, library, parlor, wet bar, bath and basement — for a wry and disquieting tour of American banality and excess. McGlynn populates these rooms with troubled and troubling characters, as in “Square Rooms”: “He had an armoire of leftover wedding champagnes. / One was called ‘You.’ One was called ‘Us.’ / The most expensive was called ‘Sex.’” Often conjuring the voice of a femme fatale, these cinematic poems are as entertaining and upsetting as “a ruinous sort of hide-and-seek in which / the hider goes to live in another house, / or disappears altogether.”

ARRIVAL

Poems

By Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

70 pp. TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University, paper, $16.95.