Poetry in a time of plague …

… The Body and the Butterfly: On Fady Joudah’s “Tethered to Stars.” (Hat tip! rus Bowden.)

Joudah has always favored lyric over exposition, but this book is more opaque than The Earth in the Attic (2008), Alight (2013), or Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018). Many of the poems are titled with signs of the zodiac or contain an astrological conceit, but they’re really the mask falling from another mask.