In the new Triquarterly John Koethe has another wistful meditation on youth and loss I can't stop admiring; the seemingly-Wittgensteinian title "21.1" turns out not to be a section notation but the split in the 220 the author thought he clocked, only to find out the blocks had been set for the quarter, giving him a jump of several yards. In another universe, Koethe's Princeton classmate John Godfrey publishes in the swarthy quarterlies and lovers of underdogs' underdogs nod approvingly when Koethe's work turns up in stapled items named after discontinued consumer brands. I want many more books by each of them.

Also in Triquarterly, some Deborah Greger poems of desolation; I liked (that's the right word) "The Middle of Nowhere," which looks down on someone's parenting skills:

We pulled into what passed for a depot
     in what was barely a town:
          the one filling station.
     A bathtub stood on stout legs
in the ladies' room, ready to bathe the family

who owned the concern. They must have lived
     somewhere in the back because,
          even at that hour,
     a child flitted like a moth
into the light that spread like an oil slick

around the pumps.

Not so much the flitting child as the oil-slick light, right? And those bathtub legs... I've only ever seen bathtubs with feet or solid sides, but that's my limited experience. All the same, I like the impression the details give of this being someone's middle-of-the-night experience, even if I suspect it's equal parts self-criticism and excitement at this pathetic landscape. Sounds comforting and familiar to me.