A Review of Starred Wire by Ange Mlinko

You can find manic invention, non-Euclidean dreamlike verbal spaces, acrobatic attempts to get around and above ordinary prose syntax, “secret arts acquired in cloven pine prisons,” in a double handful of exciting youngish poets. And you can find in an equal number some wry observations on modern urban life. It’s harder—and better—to find those virtues together, to find both the conjuring spirit’s vigor and the realist trickster’s charm. Ange Mlinko’s second book offers both.

Mlinko’s first collection, Matinees, portrayed her as the product of one place and time: Northeast Corridor America in the late-indie-rock era, with a faux-slapdash, sociable concentration very, very close to Frank O’Hara’s. Starred Wire also depicts friends, painters and rock-and-rollers, cool sites and zeitgeists: Mlinko muses on why we like botanical gardens, on how “exposed pipes that could pass / for clothes poles” become minor dangers for apartment dwellers, on what makes a museum in Brooklyn or Paris dull or fun.

Yet the world this second book inhabits extends beyond subways and clublands, far beyond “girls with the black frame glasses and white wings,” into a kind of imagined aerial realm, a Technicolor urbane pastoral, bigger and stranger than what we see with unaided eyes. A poem called “Romance” recommends “unmolding the thoughts we bore the brunt of / in order to exaggerate into paradise / displacing pages toward the shore.” Trying to improve on the visible realm, Mlinko attempts “a sort of divination, / lying down conjuring the Fred and Ginger building // so to pollinate my categories like catbirds and cowbirds.”

Mlinko’s line and stanza (like O’Hara’s) emphasize exuberance, expansion, speed. Her sensibility, however, gives equal weight to the diminutively curious: she casts herself as a patroller and omnivore, half John Ashbery, half Harriet the Spy: “A comprehensive view of the environs, through a crooked part, / is the shy girl’s cunning,” she explains. Sometimes she’s influenced by Victorian “nonsense,” asking how the unlimited inventions of childhood can salve, if not solve, adult concerns: “Insert the cherries in the earth, / read the manual for escapes, / sunscreen under the pillow, / rain scratching glasses,” she advises in “Outwitting Boy Scouts.” In her worst moments she’s simply producing nonsense— but such are the risks inventors take; in her best she offers reasons to feel happy, or apprehensive, or expectant. Even “the evening / has a beginning,” she promises, “there’s a whole museum to...