Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful

This is the Age of the Bullet, Matthew Lippman writes in Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, days in which bullets sprout other bullets in the bullet garden and a caricature of a onesie-wearing president sucking on a pacifier appears on the cover of a national magazine. Lippman’s poems are wildly inventive yet grounded in the 21st-century dailyness of parenting and dinner parties and Dunkin Donuts, all of which serve as launch pads into perennial questions of mercy and trust. I don’t care what you say about this city, Lippman writes in the title poem whose images recall New York City in the days following 9/11: We sit down together on the sidewalk / and we hold one another. These are brash, beautiful poems, big-hearted in their tilt toward sentimentality and their yearning for something more, something better.