We are fragmented—we fragment ourselves—move through time as one fragment then another and an other and so on—we fragment history—and poems are their own fragments—of existence and/or the poet and/or language that the poet wrangles with some relationship to a fragment of existence. Rarely are these fragments actually clean-cut, nameable, identifiable. People are messy, poems are hacked up and hacked out pieces of us or what we try to name.

Ailish Hopper’s Dark~Sky Society is a sturdy showing of this fragmentation. Nearly every poem possesses a scissored syntax and form, its progression chopped into moments of clarity that blur over and through one another; and by the end of the book, a wholeness seems identifiable, but the fragmentary nature of it obscures certainty.

If you’re a reader that eagerly seeks content, something concrete and easily familiar, this book, its fragmentation, will challenge you; these poems do not seek to comment or deliver verdicts but give us a thrumming glimpse in a mirror shard. The book—for those who desire groundedness—shuffles fragments of thought and observation about Blackness, Whiteness, Color, History, Imagination, Sanity, the Mind, Ignorance, a Father. Hopper’s arc—if there needs to be one in a book of poems—fluctuates between inward and outward reflection, moves from a present-history toward future-history, what we as Americans and as people might now be able to shift or reshape.

With fragments of references, riffs, and facts, Hopper has built a constellation of our human fragments—our identities, our memories, our facts (how they are manipulated), our loves, our fears, our questions—enough of a constellation we can steer ourselves onward, but a constellation that shifts as we live, and shifts from reader to reader. Dark~Sky Society may seem unstable—fragment-to-fragment—but its stability involves the reader, relies on the reader.