I was drawn to California for its poetry. I mean the Beats, but also nature poets like Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth, as well as Gary Snyder, who bridged the gap. I mean Wanda Coleman and the Quincy Troupe and Eric Priestley; Luis Alfaro, Luis J. Rodríguez, and Robin Coste Lewis. About the first thing I did when I moved to Los Angeles in 1991 was visit Beyond Baroque. For me—then, as a newcomer, as well as now—poetry is personal and communal at the same time.

Why is this important? On the one hand, poetry offers a sense of scale. California is huge and expanding: almost 164,000 square miles in area, with more than 39 million residents. How do we approach, much less encapsulate, such geographical and human breadth? The answer is that we cannot. It is here where poetry asserts itself, as a mechanism to cover both the widest distances and the narrowest intimacies.

As Courtney Faye Taylor observes in her debut collection, Concentrate, “I was often annoyed by the halo of reluctance. It was driven by an insecurity surrounding my proximity to the subject: I was writing about a city I'd never been to, smoke I hadn't witnessed, a span of years in which I hadn't even thought about myself yet. Girlsaid the reluctance, everything you have is second hand.… So I head to Los Angeles to run the archive, to be at the bottom of every place I talk about, to get the facts and their ghosts firsthand.”

Concentrate it's amazing: a conglomeration of dialogue, documentary materials, Yelp-style reviews, visual collages, narrations. Its subject is the March 1991 murder of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, a black high school student who was shot in the back of the head by Soon Ja Du, a Korean convenience store owner in South Korea. of the Angels. (The same events inform Steph Cha's 2019 novel, Your House Will Pay, to California Book Club selection.) However Concentrate it's also about Taylor's reckoning with her own experience as a black woman grappling with America's torturous racial history. “Children are not the only cause of chalk lines. You also have that sixteenth birthday allergy, got it? she reminds him of her aunt Notrie, in a conversation she remembers from adolescence. Here, at the very beginning of things, we are confronted with the ground that Taylor intends to cover, the coming and going of social and chronological space.

The chalk lines in question, after all, are those drawn around a body; his aunt's statement is intended as a warning. And yet, what is caution in a world where a black body can be attacked for any or no reason, where a visit to the store to buy a bottle of orange juice on a Saturday morning can end in a violent death?

“Normal is devastating,” Taylor writes. “The stillness lies to me.” It's a sentiment reminiscent of Claudia Rankine's. Citizenwhich Concentrate resembles it in some respects. As Citizenis a book-sized project rather than a collection, and as Citizen also, Concentrate records the lingering effects of trauma on the body. Where it differs is in the figure of Harlins, who, three decades after his death, remains a kind of ghost in the machine.

Taylor discovers this when she visits the neighborhood where her model lived and died: the convenience store, at 91st and Figueroa, which is now a market; the school Harlins attended; the park where he played. In a particularly vivid moment, Taylor finds the dead girl's name written in the cement of a sidewalk. “Latasha was here,” the inscription reads. It's so dim you could almost miss it, a reminder that Taylor means concentrate in two ways: first in terms of density, all that information, and second in terms of the need to pay attention, concentration as a survival skill.

Like Taylor, Vickie Vértiz writes from the crossroads of history, where the individual and the landscape intersect. “Have you noticed?” she asks herself in “Anther,” a Poem from her second full-length collection. Car body (she is also the author of the chapter book swallows), “how the / strobe light is also / a reflector. The very / way we are monitored is how / we celebrate.”

Vértiz is one of my favorite poets from Southern California; I have followed her work for years. In Car bodyshe picks up where the first, Palm frond with its throat cut, Stopped; the epigraph, by Adrienne Rich, is a conscious link to “Out of the Wreck,” the final poem of that earlier volume, also inspired by Rich. It's an acknowledgment that while these poems have been written to stand alone, they also exist on a continuum. Such a continuum belongs to the author, to her thinking about identity and place.

if he did it in Palm frond with its throat cutVertiz focuses on Car body in the interplay of individual and broader concerns. She digs out her secrets in the context of what she feels safe or unsafe to share. One poem is titled “This Is The Kind Of Shit I Can't Talk To Anyone About”; “But what if someone sees us”, she asks herself, “the eternal // Question that keeps me from myself”. Indeed, Car body it's riddled with hints: moving between English and Spanish, using blank spaces to represent words the poet can't write. is also, like Concentrate, a book in conversation with her influences, which include Coleman and Terrance Hayes (the title of a poem borrows its coinage, “an American sonnet”), along with Sally Mann, Cherríe Moraga, and Celia Herrera Rodríguez, who are quoted in an introductory note to the poem “Do you know what time it is?” And then, of course, there is the most constant influence: family. Car body takes its title, at least in part, from the work of Vértiz apa and their cars.

Family, however, can be a wound that cuts in more than one direction, as BH Fairchild points out in her first collection in nearly a decade, an ordinary life. Fairchild, who lives in California, grew up in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. The book begins with a poem titled “Welder,” written from the point of view of his father. However, the real suspension, the real pain, has to do with the death of the poet's adult son.

“I'm in the punk rock aisle of Rhino Records,” Fairchild confesses in “On the Sorrow God Pours Into the Little Boat of Life,” “…and I can't stop it, my son died last week, until the young woman next to me / quickly bends down and comes over to help me up.” Here we see what a poem can do to capture or evoke a moment so tense it can barely be articulated or resisted. Language as a reflection, language as a gesture, language as a statement that cannot be controlled. The most essential poems, I want to suggest, operate like this, revealing to us even (or especially) when we are desperate not to be revealed.

Throughout the book, Fairchild works on both sides of the turf; an ordinary life it is not an elegy. At the same time, we never lose sight of his late son, Paul, who appears as the ghost he has become. In the rare “Home,” Fairchild imagines or dreams himself a baseball hero, greeted across plate by “my arthritis-free wife…two steps / with my daughter” as well as by the unlikely sight of his extended family: mother, father, and the sister “who somehow escaped the coma that was / their home for so many years.” The last two lines of the poem refuse to leave me: “and I say, hello mom, hello father, hello my excellent/sister, hello my doomed and incurably sad son.”

I don't want to call this a redemption moment. How could it be when the dreamer must wake up? But for a brief respite, all the same, you're allowed to forget… or more, revisit. She is allowed to see again, touch almost everyone and everything she has lost. “The house in which she grew up,” Fairchild writes in the last stanza of the collection, “slowly sinks into darkness. / Her parents chat in the orange chairs. The dust bowl of / Kansas darkens. Somewhere, the oceans spill onto the beaches.”

There it is, all together, pain, memory and movement. the Holy Trinity. All we are is what we are.•