Kisses

In this, his fourth and finest book-length collection of poems, Steve Orlen examines, with fearless directness, the relation of the inner and outer territories that define our lives. Expansive meditations grow from moments of profound intimacy: a married couple in their ritual dance of seduction; a teenage Jew kneeling for confession so that he "might not feel so alone"; a father startled by his young son's adult-size erection. Orlen performs a kind of paradox, marrying a faith in the irreducible wisdom of story, as argued in the remarkable opening poem, to a passionate need for reflection and plain understanding. The resulting poems are among the most probing and urgent and genuine and memorable in contemporary poetry.