Lucky Fish

Book excerpt: Lucky Fish travels along a lush current — a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, “new hope,” and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for “my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew,” anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet’s third collection of poems is her strongest yet. "Nezhukumatathil's third book is fascinated with the small mechanisms of being, whether natural, personal, or imagined. Everything from eating eels in the Ozark mountains to the history of red dye finds a rich life in her poems. At times her lush settings and small stories are reminiscent of fairy tales, while at others Nezhukumatathil speaks with resonance and fierceness. Even as the poems jump from the Philippines to India to New York, they still take their time, stopping to notice that 'there is no mystery on water/ greater than the absence of rust,' and to draw small but wonderful parallels." —Publishers Weekly