THE BRASS GIRL BROUHAHA BY ADRIAN BLEVINS

Blevins has harnessed the vernacular sentence--the one great underused resource in our national repository--and put it through paces that make the language young again. Edgy, double-timing, favoring the feint and swerve, she plays the momentums of slang and syntax, run-on and compression for all they're worth. And in expert hands like these, they're worth nearly everything: these poems remind us how smart the language can be on our behalf.