Visits from the Seventh

Visits from the Seventh is a highly original debut. Arvio's wry, uncanny poems take the form of conversations between a woman and a throng on invisible presences--visitors, as she calls them--who counsel, challenge, cajole and comfort her. Together they murmur about destiny, the moon, a walk on Park Avenue, sex, ambition, dreams. "Poets," writes Richard Howard, "find remarkable ways to talk to themselves, to divide and triumph, to split the speech-atom--'the journal of my other self,' Rilke call