Raymond McDaniel

continued

year's National Poetry Series competition, avoids a sequence. There is no easy this-happens-then-that-happens way to read the book.

Yet the story beneath it is interesting. At the risk of doing violence to the poet's intention and of getting the whole story wrong, I'll try to re-create a bit of it. A young woman (known only as "indigo" or "violet" or both) is trained by shadowy faceless bureaucrats (the janissaries) to be an assassin for an unnamed but all-powerful government. She is good at what she does. At some point, either fleeing or overwhelmed by half-understood moral compunction, she sneaks into an abbey. The assassin becomes the penitent, although the possibility for absolution seems remote. McDaniel gives us some clues to this in a prologue: "Imagine an epic from which a minor character walks away. / Epic-adjacent. cloister as the sisters sleep."

All this might sound needlessly difficult, but it's not, really. Once you accept the position (uncomfortable for some readers) that the poet will not give you the order of things, but that you will have to bring the fragments together in your own imagination, Murder becomes an exhilarating puzzle, for which any solution you find feels right. Then you can give yourself over to the subtle atmosphere that these fragments create. That atmosphere is the ultimate success of the book.