All This Could Be Yours

All This Could Be Yours
Joshua Trotter

There are several poems in Joshua Trotter’s debut outing that are titled “figures” (as in fig. 1, fig. 2, fig. 3). And while I wouldn’t want to lean on the analogy too much, there’s something of the sketch artist, the diagrammatic, about his poetry, which is introduced to us by the figure (meaning character) of an architect at his drafting board. One has the sense that the external world, its hubbub and flotsam and jetsam, presents itself as a kind of code that communicates itself to us without language, which may explain why sound is so much in the driver’s seat and some of the lines take on the tink-a-tink of Stevens with their frequent internal rhymes, homophones and assonance. A complex, captivating book with a puzzle-making quality to its verse that compels re-reading.