Blue Loop: Poems(The National Poetry Series)

Blue Loop is composed of poems about addiction and recovery, using meditation as a lens through which memories of loss and harm might begin to be processed and accepted. It seeks to prioritize—and demonstrate—dwelling with the self in the present moment, avoiding the tendency to do what those in the recovery community call future tripping: our innate, strong desire to visit things not yet come to pass through the mode of anxious attachment. In fact, these poems are against attachment, in the Buddhist sense, accepting and appreciating the beneficial gifts of calm from loved ones and community of all kinds but in search of release from the need to rely on such connections completely. Therefore, often, they are lonely poems. Despite searching for connection, the speaker remains most faithful to—and finds grounding in—the self. The goal of Blue Loop is to provide potential strategies and modes of thought for readers navigating any form of recovery or in search of more balanced being.

About the Author :
AJ WHITEis a poet and educator from north Georgia. He is the winner of the 2023 Fugue Poetry Prize, selected by Kaveh Akbar, and of a 2023 Academy of American Poets University Prize, selected by Tara Betts. His poems have also appeared in The Account, Best New Poets, Overheard, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and lives in New York.

Review :
In this searing debut, language loops back and forth across chasm and current to both rescind and remake a present in collision with a future that it does not recognize in its constant approach. Braiding words across histories and memory and space and time, White pulls the present closer to examine the speaker’s place within it, as well as the concrete details that make life events concerning addiction, recovery, and loss possible. In elegantly crafted poems that are both startling and arresting, White’s collection deftly emulates the structural integrity of a star’s blue loop, while mimicking its instability as it evolves. As such, Blue Loop makes space for transformation: through language, in a life, and in the reader. It asks one to enter the experiences of these poems and leave them not just changed but rearranged by all that has ‘been abandoned / into this life’ that is there yet not there, gone yet not gone. It is a graceful, surprising book that I will return to again and again.