“Too much talent colliding with ambition can’t help,” Standard Schaefer writes in his debut book of poems, Nova. And it’s these moments of wry humor that coax the reader, in little starts, into entering Standard’s own intense word-logic.

In Nova, more often than not, you’re responsible for your own meaning-making. Yet the poems also have their own internal logic, created by an odd scientific language—complete with footnotes and an pseudo-narrative of recurring characters, images, and action, an obsession with the gist and grit of things. And again, humor. The footnote for the word “foam”: “Our lather who is in curved and thick space, hollow is the sequential advance echoing through your name.”

—More of my thoughts here.