The remnants of a shattered crime organization wait on a Southern plantation for the Civil War to finish them off. Their charismatic—if physically stunted and theatrical leader—Thaddeus Morelle, a “plain-faced dumpling of a man” known as the Redeemer, is dead, leaving his underlings to piece together this assemblage of individual retrospectives. So goes the plot of Canaan’s Tongue, the second book by prizewinning author John Wray (The Right Hand of Sleep). Their trade, which involves the springing of slaves to sell at a profit and eventually murder, is threatened by the rising tide of abolitionist sentiment, the same on which they once depended. Vicious criminals, yes, and yet none of Wray’s characters are at any point islands unto themselves. Instead, they are all subject to the will of a still-higher power, becoming its “play-thing” and being “fashioned and favored toward that end alone.” Even the big shots get stuck with this bone. This is life as part of “the Trade,” a continuously re-invented enterprise that we are told will eventually encompass the world and hide in the very language, feeding on us even while we think ourselves cured. The novel’s political premise is none-too-subtle: men and women, lured by the promise of freedom and prosperity, walk right into slavery and death. “The country itself will have this fever,” we are warned, and “its transparency will be its shelter.” Yet if Wray stops just short of using billboards to advertise this point, Canaan still manages to fascinate us with its gothic intrigue and imaginative strangeness. It is a rare and absorbing book that manages to transcend both historical period and cultural agenda to deliver what is ultimately a fresh perspective on a tried and tired Matrix school of thought.

Since I don’t have too much space, I’ll just out with it: Undanceable, by Merrill Gilfillan, is the best new book of poetry I’ve read this year. Though not a new poet (he published his first collection in 1970), he’s new to me, and a revelation. Comprised of short, efficient, effective (and affecting) lyric poems, often written in serial sequences under one title, this singular collection contains everything I need from a book of poetry. In short: it sings. Just listen: “Sunrise more/a porridge than a fire:/low slough/of off-whites, cold grays./One long lone rosy bar/far south–” This is a man who knows his phonemes! A veritable encyclopedia of bird-knowledge, tree-knowledge, and earth-knowledge, Undanceable homes in on the language of the natural world (specifically that of the western United States) without falling prey to easy idealizations of nature-with-a-capital-N. Which is not to say these poems are tame. Many of them actually bite–deliciously–and with great wit. Listen: “In an ancient world like this/is, the penalty for harming/a live tree­–navel cut out/spiked to the injured trunk/then driven around/and around it/till full length/of the gut is wrapped/about the tree./A sort of May day/upside down.” If anyone has any further questions about lyric poetry’s right to sing in the face of modern horror, please address them to Theodor Adorno. Kudos to Flood Editions for calling attention to yet another diamond in the “sough.”