Anyone: Phoenix Poets

Milton’s God
Where I-95 meets The Pike,
a ponderous thunderhead flowered—
 
stewed a minute, then flipped
like a flash card, tattered
edges crinkling in, linings so dark
with excessive bright
 
that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge,
the onlooker couldn’t decide
 
until the end, or even then,
what was revealed and what had been hidden.
 
 
Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, Nate Klug’s Anyone traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes—natural and domestic, political and religious—across America’s East and Midwest. The book’s title foregrounds the anonymity it seeks through several means: first, through close observation (a concrete saw, a goshawk, a bicyclist); and, second, via translation (satires from Horace and Catullus, and excerpts from Virgil’s Aeneid). Uniquely among contemporary poetry volumes, Anyone demonstrates fluency in the paradoxes of a religious existence: “To stand sometime / outside my faith . . . or keep waiting / to be claimed in it.” Engaged with theology and the classics but never abstruse, all the while the poems remain grounded in the phenomenal, physical world of “what it is to feel: /  moods, half moods, / swarming, then darting loose.”