Poetry collections by Nickole Brown, William Fuller, Rick Barot

Married and pregnant by 16, a mother of seven, never literate (her grocery lists consisted of tiny drawings), all her “teeth pulled when she was thirty-six,” Fanny in Brown’s telling was never a victim but an eccentric, outlandish, endearing and finally prosperous “woman/ up from poor soil, bad dirt,” “sturdy, thorned, green.”

Later in life, Fanny drove an “Eldorado, a car impossibly/ long with impossible fins,” kept a gun among her hair rollers, and wore the same outfit — “a businessman’s short-sleeve, white” shirt, “soft cotton sweats,” “white Keds” — day after day, year after year.

[...] phrases show Fanny’s notions of dignity, along with the limits of her social world.

In it the grown-up lesbian Southern poet celebrates Fanny’s quirks and Fanny’s endurance, laments Fanny’s limited options in “such a different time,” and considers Fanny’s — and her own — white privilege.

Fuller’s slippery prose poems and cautious, slow-paced stanzas never stop asking how we know what we know, “whether I knew this then or know this now,” how the mind works when the mind turns back on itself, trying to find out what we mean when we say “I.” Can we “watch the future arrive from the past, or from what precedes the past, make a clearing for it, build it a fire”?

A poem called “The Electric Garden” begins, “I grow tired of trying to understand why they think that way, or even if what they are doing should be called thinking, given that it concludes in a low buzzing sound interspersed with clicks.”

Other people’s thoughts are to this ratiocinative poet like the snapping of distant fingers, or maybe like the buzzing of crickets or bees.

Veering into quasi-philosophical logic and then dive-bombing its own tentative conclusions, Fuller’s disquieting paragraphs open up into a “place where I was and I wasn’t there,” a site where “the wind had folded me up, though I’d forgotten it or assigned the memory to someone else.”

Barot commemorates his grandmother, remembers his family’s roots in the Philippines, considers his years in the Bay Area and in Tacoma, Wash. (where he lives now), all in the added harsh light of public history.

Because I was equipped with memory,” “Tacoma Lyric” begins, “the sugarcane fields are still burning somewhere.

A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Barot displays the narrative gifts and the seriousness that the prestigious fellowship seems to encourage.

Barot can ask what an image is worth, whether poems are worth anything or whether “no good has come/ of any word I’ve made, spoken or borrowed,” since siblings still quarrel, parents and grandparents still die, no matter how generous he can make his poems.

Here as in both his previous books, Barot’s lines ask that we read them slowly, that we ask how he came to write them, how he can “keep distressing the canvas/ of the personal”: They are not like chapters in a prose autobiography, but follow the unpredictable logic of individual poems.