Another Round

After a ten-year hiatus from poetry, the critic, essayist, and gifted investigative journalist Michael Lista has published his third collection, following his spectacular debut, Bloom, and his slim, fact-based The Scarborough. Given Lista’s abrupt change in theme, tone, and structure, as well as the quality of the gathered poems, it is perhaps necessary to evaluate Barfly and Other Poems by first taking a brief look back.

The poems in Bloom — richly allusive, disciplined yet what-the-hell playful, with their unusually inventive language — had been lapped up by major magazines since 2007, before a publishing house (House of Anansi Press) issued Lista a contract.* He “made it new” with the resulting book, published in 2010, which featured a page-turning narrative structure that allowed each poem to soar on its own. Four years later, this tour de force was followed by The Scarborough, an extraordinary, terrifying expanse of...