Foxglovewise

By Ange Mlinko

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025

Ange Mlinko’s latest book of poems begins at a Greek Orthodox Epiphany celebration and ends in a cemetery. Its title, Foxglovewise, stems from a poem by Louise Glück, who didn’t coin the term, but provided the pole toward which the needle of Mlinko’s compass tends: “. . . are you like the hawthorn tree, / always the same thing in the same place, / or are you more the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing up / a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies, / and the next year, purple in the rose garden?”

Inconsistency is the word. With stops in Edinburgh, Crete, East Texas, Key West, and Dry Tortuga, Mlinko’s poems chart a restless zigzag path from the mosquito-infested bayous of Florida to the concrete sprawl of L.A. They find the Iliad in a Scottish cemetery, “Apollo driving a yellow / SLK 320 on the 405,” and Nancy Drew traversing a coral archipelago. They juxtapose the old and the new, to be sure, but also the old and the very, very old, as when Eastern Christianity takes a seat next to Ancient Greek polytheism, in a poem that enters a gift shop: “St. Michael spears the basilisk, / and Medusa rears her seething skull.”

And if Mlinko’s sensibility is pleasantly multivalent, so is her approach to writing the poems themselves. Astoundingly, virtually all of the poems rhyme, though the rhyming is easy to miss: Mlinko’s schemes tend to be airier, more dispersed, less conventional than the checkerboards diagrammed in English 101; as many as three or four lines routinely intervene between rhyming ones; and the effect, for readers of 21st-century poetry especially, which so often dispenses with rhyme entirely, can be vaguely disarming. It turns out that when rhyme relinquishes its tradition of insistency the lines end up tapping out what amounts to a more elusive music.

Mlinko is an exacting wordsmith, a masterful turner of phrases and configurer of tones, but it’s the sounds her poems make, playing and replaying them just before they fade, that makes the poetry memorable. This combination—of steel-cut verses, their forms as real and as fleeting as clouds—is thrilling for the reader, if somewhat perplexing for the critic. How does she make it look so easy? Take a stanza from a poem called “Orangerie”:

Fruit in different stages of production muscles

the bough into a bow, the bow into a lyre,

plucked string lengths sounding a golden mean.

They long to dispense their light in bushels,

these overburdened arms; as they grow higher,

            they find my roof, on which they lean,

The poem continues for another couple of sestets (Mlinko loves her sestets), its unfurling as natural as the gradual blooming of a flower. Thank goodness for this. Poetry that wears its seatbelt is often misunderstood to be less free, restricted, too damn pre-determined. But a poem that feels safe is a poem that’s in a position to take the right kinds of risks. Needless to say, most free verse crashes through the windshield before it reaches its destination.

“Hemmed in” by the exigencies of such stanzaic tyrants as ABCDABCD and ABCDDCBA, Mlinko doesn’t just rhyme at the ends of her lines, but fills her pages with memorably striking images. There’s the “polyphemus moth / flattened like peanut-buttered / toast points on the footpath.” There’s the “tight-swathed, foiling hairdresser / (whose biceps playing peekaboo, // as he parts and lifts and snips, / suggest the weight of the flattening iron / or the tensility in the ringlets of that siren / chatting about her upcoming trips).” It’s marvelous stuff, manna from heaven, water in the desert of the current scene.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.