Lisa Russ Spaar’s last book of poems, Blue Venus, dwelled primarily in memory, meditation, and the mind. While her new book follows suit, it is also intensely bodied, uncovering the material alongside the metaphysical. Spaar’s language has become more muscular, more erotic, and more insistently visceral, as if by attending to the particularity of words she could conjure them into being. In a sense, she does. The poems of Satin Cash are so attuned to the natural world that hills become “script,” the bark of a sycamore reveals “a stuccoed font,” and a stream serves as “a transcript.” If such textuality suggests that nature must be read with care, Spaar is too philosophical a poet to accept even her own interpretations, recognizing the implicit mystery attached to every word and thing. Thus, in response to the noise of sparrows, one speaker asks, “Noun or verb, that singing?”

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—Jennifer Chang