I know I’m late to the party, but Natalie Lyalin is just so fantastic I kind of don’t know what to do with myself.

I ordered Pink and Hot Pink Habitat after reading about Natalie Lyalin on HTMLGIANT a couple of weeks ago, because I swallowed the excerpts posted and was hooked.  And oh, wow. Wow. Wow.

Sorry. Let me be more articulate. I haven’t come across anyone whose poetry I admire so much in years. If someone were to crawl into my brain, poke around in there and come up with an exact poetry for me, that poetry would be Lyalin’s poetry. It’s so cerebral, so centered, so language-rich, and yet so strangely jagged and unsettling at the same time. It dances around meaning and causes havoc inside the word factory.

Lyalin probably does it for me because I love poets who make language work harder, who twist it up, who force it to do things it wouldn’t normally do and go places it wouldn’t normally go. And Lyalin does that. Teeth have stars. “Jobs Trending” is a proper name. The Loch Ness monster waits for sonar. Strawberries and horses become buttons. And every once in a while, too, a clear and exact statement that aims dead and true and is all the more devastating in its plainness; in “There are Four Chambers of the Heart,” Lyalin writes, “I wanted to tell them, we do not need a/country. We can destroy ourselves here.”

And yet none of this is gamesmanship, or nonsense, or random, or for show. A pattern emerges in the poetry; language obscures but also clarifies meaning. Something is hidden in these poems–a submerged something that dulls in the eye next to the dazzling flashes of perfect prose. In Pink and Hot Pink Habitat, Lyalin has produced coal from diamonds.