In The make an effort to Adore, Al...

In The make an effort to Adore, Alane Rollings's metrical compositions seem to surface from a knotty interior sea. The poems are intensely voiced: the reader becomes a kind of privileged eavesdropper in succession Rollings's ruminative and exacting addresses - whether to herself, a lover or another evanescent "you" who obeys to anchor a particular drama of consciousness or remembrance. Rollings is an anatomist of possession and its varieties: romantic thralldom, abjection, communion, ecstasy (possession in the present) chance of the desired end (possession by the future), nostalgia (possession on the past). Her writing is