Poetry

Tony Trigilio’s Historic Diary (named after Lee Harvey Oswald’s account of his time in the Soviet Union) excavates the nightmarish record of the first Kennedy assassination, its auguries and aftermath, with a blue fury and an obsessive zeal that border on the Talmudic. What he finds there goes beyond chilling to a pure-product-of-America craziness that makes me tremble for my country. “I am waiting // for someone to / ride me, the / locomotive of history,” Trigilio writes, and his ticket beyond the grave takes us, willy-nilly, on this scarifying, brilliant, and disturbing ride.—Rachel Loden