There is an assured inside and outside to Alli Warren’s poems. On the inside is a perspicuous tenderness, a white spot, a body endeavored and eager to explore what a bodiness is. What are arms, what are inside arms and is there a proper poetics of flesh that would account for how arm-y that feels to a body’s physical existence? Does that physicality have anything to say to the emotional presence when you’re feeling your body? This inwardness, and the language best suited to it, is Warren’s primary poetic operation. Like to the point a good reader will adjust the rhythms they use for reading. Slow down, feel the motion. Because reading her is like saying the word “assiduous” to yourself, for the thick sensation it puts in your mouth and for the actual definition of the word. That’s how close she’s keeping her voice. And you should be thinking of why she would do that while you’re also preparing your ear for what the language is really saying. It takes a little work!
There is reason, though, for Warren keeping her voice so close. If her poems are going to primarily exist in a just-beneath-the-skin kind of way, they’re doing that because outside the poems politics are everywhere. Priorities. Schemas. Economical appropriations. When Aimé Césaire juxtaposes the value of poetic knowledge to the value of scientific knowledge, he’s observing how governments and economies are very coercive in their uses of language. It’s in the numbers, so to speak. In the 1980s, a whole new language of implication was developed with the use of Excel spreadsheets. Numbers attached to language with an inspirational financial poetics to keep people talking. Warren’s book knows of language like these, and how they’re used to make significant decisions. It’s modeled often as an urban presence. The kind you can find in George Oppen’s ‣. However, where Oppen uses poems to give shape to his city, recognizing the special role class can have on an individual’s view, Warren’s book dwells more on an individual’s insularity. She’s as conscious as Oppen that she has a place in the city. But the poems exist in their reaction to the city’s pressures.
A pressure that pulls from a PoeticsofBody for its articulation. Warren’s poems are fleshy without making explicit reference to flesh. It’s something in her poetic “sentences.” Which are comparable to the shifting sentence used in Amanda Nadelberg’s Shake Until Cloudy (see REVIEW: Shake Until Cloudy (The Song Cave, 2026)). Warren uses a similar regressive syntax, where the sentence is denied its efficient completion. However, Nadelberg’s poetic “sentence” often operates like shifting sands. Something rhetorically fragmented but still rooted in poetic sentiment. For Warren, it feels more like the sentences fragment, because they’re routing through her body. And not just in its vague imagistic references to blood and holes. There are moments where the sentence literally leads the reader to logic through the body.
in company, in “hurt and thrill” chamomile, pâté, cherries, and champagne sounds so luxurious when you lift your pointer slowly like that, and it is, I do in the sticky groove of restless longing
(from “Mercy”)
“Sticky groove of restless longing” definitely has a body type feel to it. But what I find more interesting is how luxury takes on meaning if you can point your finger slowly in its direction. As though luxury is its fact (the charcuterie plate that might be associated with owning a Lambo). But for the poet to understand its true import, she would need a gesture that traveled through her body. It’s a substantive gesture to organics and decay and whatever term might be used to describe a logic the body understands, because it’s what the body is actually doing.
In Tandem, by Anna Ting Möller
Möller’s work has a root in disgust—something I don’t hear in Warren’s work. And it’s because of its insularity. A language of within. An organic handling of her sentences. Reshaping a sentence so it’s accounting for these organic shifts in sentiment is where her work is most similar to Möller. Möller’s art is designed to degrade its outer skin as time goes on. A tension between artistic preservation and the materials she uses. Both Möller and Warren undo the expectation of their medium (materials that can be conserved for Möller and a sentence’s sanctity for Warren). And it’s a core aspect of their work.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.