There are poems that roll along, lulling with a quiet certainty in each line, and then there are poems that strike with a blunt force, shouting questions previously unasked. Bianca Stone's What Is Otherwise Infinite does both. Divided into four sections (Monad, Dyad, Triad and Tetrad), Stone's collection is a weaving of search and rescue, of lost and found, a containing of things that cannot be contained. Though most of the more than 50 poems are in free verse with traditional alignment, some of the selections play with structure and spacing, letting the words interact with the white space in more complex patterns.
Stone (The Möbius Strip Club of Grief) regularly employs language and imagery that will be familiar to readers who have grown up in the church, lines that glance at biblical allusion or that tangle with ideas more often kept safe in a sermon. But Stone is no easy penitent, attempting "the leftover/ saggy and unreal job/ of aging/ towards benediction," convinced people are "No more miraculous/ than the plainest of birds." Her lines will also resonate with readers who want to change and don't know how, those who know both the comfort and the critique of the words, "We are all only this." Whether dealing with alcoholism, motherhood, climate change or literature, Stone faces each difficult truth. She does not shrink from the hard facts, preferring to look at them square and then allow her language to refract them back to the reader in sharp, crystalline focus. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian