Quicker Than the Eye

A collection of minimalist poems, Quicker Than the Eye begins with an abridged history of oral storytelling: “In an instant, there is a person, a thing, an action.” Joe Fiorito came to poetry from journalism, which, as he writes, is “quicker than the eye.” A master of compression, portraiture, and broken beauty, Fiorito condenses worlds into a few taut lines:

A cake will catch fire.
I gave five puffs and have nothing
to prove but

my love.

Fiorito’s fidelity to getting the instant right, the book’s overarching ars poetica, depends on the reliability of memory, which he renders as no less fraught than storytelling:

[…] what I recall
is not the thing,
but a memory

[…]

the memory of
a memory of
her lips.

Deploying perfect rhymes as well as inventive prosody and enjambments (“limbs & dead- // heads in salt water”), Fiorito’s muscular poems often end not on moments of insight but rather with dissonant closures that refuse epiphany (“I shut up”; “I hold my breath”). At times his craft is nothing short of breathtaking:

his blood is
a red spit-whip,
slo-mo

in air.

The effect of this subtractive style is that imaginative conjuring is required of the reader, to complete or interpret the poems’ impressionistic tableaux: a decidedly pleasurable activity.

Many of the poems read as allegories or fables, and humor (“ESL Fatigue,” jokes with nuns) abounds, along with tragedy and childhood trauma. In “I and My Brothers” we learn that the speaker is the sole survivor of four brothers, the other three having succumbed to addiction,

[…] done in
by the want—not mine
—of love.

Poems like “Rom Com” and “Hot Love” parlay romantic love with violence in ways that feel real rather than metaphorical. For the protean speaker, who “observe[s] // the obverse,” Marianne Moore’s hope that poetry might hold “a place for the genuine” adheres in poems that arrive at verisimilitude through authenticity:

I am true to myself, I am
Polonius in a tent,

or I am his son.

The poems in Quicker Than the Eye are a marvel for the eye, ear, and mind, achieving that rarest of poetic feats: reportage turned song.