Not Now Now

In Sandra Doller’s vivid, syntactically knotty new book, Not Now Now, the reader revels in a tangle of music, make-believe, motherhood, and the convolutions of collective entanglement. These poems are funny and forceful, disrupting temporal and structural expectations with an insistence on a single word’s potential to shift the mood or rev a line’s engine. Not Now Now interrogates the often-pernicious language of ordinary forms: “A paragraph is not a problem / a poem is,” she writes, “It’s not like I sit around / yesterday’s news.” The three sequences that comprise this exciting new collection underscore Doller’s continued assertion of wonder as ethos amid chaos.