Disappointed to find that most of these National Book Award winning poems didn't register much with me. She changes form a good deal, using found text poetry, shape poetry, prose poetry, etc., which probably impresses judges but tends to distract me, and I dislike found poetry anyway (stop doing that, people!). And the personal poems here I found dull.

But! This collection is named for a series of poems around the Annunciation, and "Conversion Figure" and "Annunciation in Play" I really liked. The first is told by the angel Gabriel:

I spent a long time falling
toward your slender, tremulous face -

a long time slipping through stars
as they shattered, through sticky clouds
with no confetti in them.

The shattering stars reflect the violently disruptive event that God taking on human form would be, and the clouds with no confetti foreshadow the humble birth, the dangerous life.

Girl on the lawn without sleeves, knees bare even of lotion,
time now to strip away everything
you try to think about yourself.

Bearing the son of God would surely trigger a massive crisis of self-image, radically changing how you view yourself and your role in the world. In "Annunciation in Play", Szybist suggests Mary would, in self-defense, try to delay this encounter that would necessitate such hard work:

-into the 3rd second, the girl
holds on, determined not to meet his gaze-

she swerves her blue sleeve,
closes down the space,
while his eyes are intent, unwilling
to relent and

late into the 5th second they are still
fighting on

But the girl knows she cannot put off this meeting with God's angel for long.

but the delay

is what she has
before his expert touch
swings in, before
she loses her light, clean edges, before she
loses possession-

before they look at each other.

It's a touching poem of the hesitation, fear, reluctance we can imagine Mary would have felt, about to lose her current sense of self and idealized life, in the moments before she replied, "be it unto me according to thy word." ( )

Incarnadine truly made me feel creeped out at the idea of the annunciation (thankfully). Szybist has a way of communicating experiences that I (the male reader) could never be privy to and gathers the threads of history, theology, identity, and womanhood and creates such powerful poems as she threads them together.

Welp, this was a set of poems that hit me right in my past as a medievalist who worked on Middle English mystics as well as someone who loves gorgeous language and experiments in form. I especially loved "Conversion Figure", "Hail", and "Update on Mary" though I think my favorite lines are in "Invitation" - "Angels of prostitution and rain/you of sheerness and sorrow/you who take nothing/breathe into me". I can think of at least one person I know who is also a poet who should read this immediately if she hasn't. ( )

Mary Szybist's second collection reaches for heaven through an imagining of the experience of Mary at Annunciation, and sometimes touches it with such lovely and simple language as:

"Time to enter yourself. Time to make your own sorrow. Time to unbrighten and discard even your slenderness."

"...having bathed carefully in the syllables of your name,"

"Now what seas, what meanings can I place in you?"

There are times when the simplicity becomes merely prosaic and the collection is a bit uneven. Still and all, a worthy effort. ( )

Szybist presents an accessible collection of thirty-four cleverly constructed poems. Many of the poems are reflections on the Christian story of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary that she is to bear the messiah, but the reflections are not always conventionally religious, many are sensual, a few carnal, two borrow quotes by public figures from public documents and build her text around them, and one redacts the gospel text to emphasize the awesome fear of the encounter. There is also a poem presented as a diagrammed sentence and one as a circular series of radiating lines as it appears on a ceiling mural in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. ( )