Steven Vincent

The test of a true poem, Stephen Vincent writes, is how not to die for it. How can a book that chills you to the bone — As Jack Spicer’s Language surely does — become a structuring, challenging, politicizing and even comforting recurring presence through forty years of a life lived under its spell? With a hard-won, contrarian patience, Vincent applies the test, and the hope he finds at the end is all the more convincing for the precarious-ness of the path it takes through the silent gap between No and One listens to poetry. —Peter Manson