John Keene, _Punks: New and Selected Poems_

 "NEW AND SELECTED" ordinarily signals that the poet has already published four or five collections and is a well-established, mid-career poet who has attracted enough interest to warrant a publisher's venturing on an "introduction to" volume. So far as I can tell, however, this is Keene's first collection. He has published a book of (brilliant) short fiction, Counternarratives, and a book of (likewise brilliant) essays (or perhaps "experimental novel"), Annotations, and a chapbook or two, but no collections from which poems could be selected in the ordinary way. 

Perhaps, though, the subtitle is a way to indicate that this a debut collection that is not exactly a debut, i.e., not a book by someone newly and dewily emerged from an MFA program. Keene is no fledgling. Punks is more like Wallace Stevens's Harmonium or Robert Duncan's Opening of the Field; it's the first collection of someone who has been publishing for quite a while and whose first collection readers have for years and years been jonesing for. In effect, he indeed is a well-established, mid-career poet.

And a strong one, so no wonder  that the book won the National Book Award in 2022 (and a Lambda Literary Award and a Thom Gunn Award). 

The book has wide stylistic variety--not the variety of "I'm going to try to write a sestina now," but the variety of an evolving, exploratory, deeply-considered relationship to form. We get not only some high-polish New Yorker-ish things, some dramatic monologues somewhat reminiscent of that modern master of the form, Richard Howard, but also some poems that seem to have the spoken-word urgency slam and some experimental page-as-field poems. 

We can also tell that the the poems were not all written recently. The book's opening sections, "Playland" and "The Lost World" evoke the LGBTQ social and cultural milieu of the 1980s and 1990s as it was lived in different American cities, the feeling of emerging affirmation and pride strong and salient even while the shadow of AIDS flickers. The same sense of a long-maturing, generations-deep awareness informs the poems that deal with Black history (unsurprising coming from the author off Counternarratives). 

I couldn't say whether Punks is going to have the long tail of Harmonium or Opening of the Field, but I think it very well could. It's really good.