Heather June Gibbons, _Her Mouth as Souvenir_

THE TERMS OF the Agha Shahid Ali Prize probably do not include the submission's being one Ali himself would have enjoyed, but I suspect he (whom I know only through his work) would have enjoyed this one. It's a brilliant debut.

Part I includes a lot of first-person statements and seems to have a layer of personal history, both family ("My people walked over mountains and buried children on the trail / for a prophet who led them to a lake of salt") and individual ("When the acupuncturist examines / the film on my tongue, I'm afraid / she'll see I'm prone to night sweats //and sobbing at the dolphin show"). It's witty, caffeinated, headlong, fizzy with wit and invention.

Part II is about love and music. Several of the poems are titled "Sore Song," which I am guessing has to do with getting "eros" backward, and they beautifully capture that feeling of coming unglued:

Meet me at the secret airport. You'll know me

by the spinner lure in my hair and it will feel like

the first time I saw you on the cover of a magazine

lying next to an empty bottle in some other

woman's kitchen.

Gibbons may yet one day write the screenplay for the world's first surrealistic romantic comedy, which I hope she will title The Secret Airport.

Part III also has its own atmosphere, Ashberyean, I would say, juxtaposing specialized language with colloquialism, veering off suddenly at oblique angles.

Evidently metaphors arouse the sensory cortex.

Sexy. Some days, my yard becomes a metaphor

for everything I do wrong: moldy dog shit,

stray butts, a shrub's yellowed leaves.

They say if you're sad, you haven't been

smiling enough. Want to make better decisions?

Eat more cheese.

And I would like to mention that the book's final poem invokes Nebraska's own Weldon Kees, which all by itself would make me a fan--but the whole book is excellent.