A Boy in the City

S. Yarberry’s A Boy in the City circles around desire in search of both erotic love and of the understanding that comes with intimacy. In “Medusa,” a speaker gets “dressed in a festoonery / of manhood. Coat. Buttons on the left” as they attempt to control their outward appearance and the way in which the world wants them. “Oh, I’ll tell you about a complicated / man” the speaker continues, invoking Homer (in Emily Wilson’s translation), one of many intertextual allusions that Yarberry deploys, weaving fresh angst into classic themes in poems whose tone is often disarmingly conversational. In “Lips, crash with lips inevitable,” a compelling progression of images draws us through the poem: 

Barnacles are dying. How horrible to watch your life
go by and want so much. Those purple mountains, rough—
mouths agape. You wake me up—we kiss

Elsewhere, enjambment and repetition drive a sense of rhythm and urgency, while a focus on interiority often culminates in something approximating a list poem, as in “Self-Portrait (Punching Ball)”:

I am. I am. I am an invention.
A head stripped to muscle.
When I take apart an image—
a self comes into view. Candle.
Omelet. Pile of hair. […]

Ekphrastic poems after Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst explore the struggle to accurately represent the self. In “Untitled Nature Study after Hilma Klint,” a speaker’s desire reaches a tipping point—“We bloom. We say: good night. / Meaning: pick me: I reek of want.”

Often, the speaker in these poems wrestles with language, pushing up against its limits while seeking to convey complex truths in lines like “I don’t have the words / for what we are building” and “I hate all the words I have—each one / cannot get to you.” Throughout this collection, Yarberry challenges us to reassess the complexities of desire itself, the ways in which we want to be wanted as our whole selves, as in these lines from the book’s opening poem, “The History”: 

If the universe decides to take me—
I hope it swallows me whole.