With the knowledge that reflection, like creation, inherits nothing, poet Aviya Kushner, in Eve and All the Wrong Men, draws note from stone and makes music of the locality that resides in looking back. While whole days go missing from reader and writer alike, Kushner’s Eve, with her extra moments, returns art to art as the past taps melancholy as its future hire. These are poems of reclaim and removal, plaintively progressive, and in each a prolonged brevity bells visions for an eyesight untethered that sees Adam absorbed into the loneliness of she who creates herself second and then watches as god is devoured by a belief that’s eating for two. If one can picture a bottle of milk as perhaps the first thing broken by a child crawling into a refrigerator, then one can believe there is a rib warmer than the others. If one has no backstory, then one can narrate an imaginary dream. So it is with if, and so it is with then. Here: If Eve, then Eve.

Barton Smock