Snakes and Babies

The one-word titles of Jules Gibbs’s Snakes and Babies are potentialities of immense expansion. These poems are incapable of being singular, inert, quiet. They are manifold, animated, agitated by energies of politics, dreams, and desires—systems of menace and pleasure. She obeys Celan’s advice to "speak, but keep yes and no unsplit," but in all other ways is disobedient to "love’s old patterns." The weather is rain. The ecology is woman. The time is violence. The angels are emus, flightless, and