Lifeboat by Kristine Ong Muslim

Kristine Ong Muslim’s haunting collection, Lifeboat, solidifies Muslim’s reputation as a poet of loss, of absence. In “The Alchemical Stages,” the speaker invites readers to enter one of the most brilliant poetic minds writing today, “Here is disillusionment. Here is isolation. Peer inside its shell. Then tell us what you see . . . ” In the poem “Twilight does not grow overnight,” she writes that, “The coroner, who must’ve seen it all, / …does not avert his gaze from a spot / on the floor as if he is waiting / for a love poem to materialize / under the stainless steel table.” Muslim finds beauty in the most unlikely of places and creates a world unimagined since the time of the surrealists.
—Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time and The Children’s War and Other Poems

The often surreal, always sharp poems in Lifeboat accumulate to a haunting whole. Here, among destruction, “the children in my town chose names / for their favorite colors.” Hope, like imperfect light, finds the cracks: “Love is that mute and shapely device / that cannot teach, that only lives in / houses with crooked teeth.” A fine, transformative collection.
—Nick Ripatrazone, author of Ember Days, We Will Listen For You, and Good People