Jalousie

The reflective debut from Paty plays with patterns of sunlight and opaqueness, exploring the limits of perception and expression while characterizing human interaction as “little incursions into our separateness.” A “jalousie” is a louvered window that both shades and exposes, whose “slat beheads my landlord’s swan-shaped planting pot.” Here, it is also an apt metaphor for consciousness and desire, as Paty’s skilled writing demonstrates—one doesn’t look out without also looking in: “you want/ what she has/ easy limbs and/ a deft gait/ but don’t you/ already have it?” Viewing a changed city through the slats of memory or a workday through a constant stream of backward-looking thought (in the long poem “Premise”), the writer posits the human figure against a fleeting landscape: “that was childhood, then childhood was over.” Welcome rhymes emerge from time to time: “One renders what is happening/ moves to say what has been./ A tenderness to walk the fault lines/ and slip oneself in.” While abstract enough to stymie some readers, most of these finely crafted poems offer their textured surfaces with a calm intelligence and without pretension. It’s a strong first outing. (Apr.)