'Forget safety. Tell me more about accident, ' says Paisley Rekdal, and that might well be her ars poetica. The poems in A Crash of Rhinos are smart, funny, and sexy--beat that for a trifecta. But Rekdal is not after mere sensation. She pursues the seeming randomness of life for the knowledge it has to offer: 'That night in question--its arson, its accident-- / it was the first moment / I knew how to love you.'

What a fabulous and fabular debut . . . The spacious narrative plane of the book is crisscrossed with myriad purposes. Here the tropes of physical science, the tactics of exploration narratives, the rich lineage of literary forebears--and all the risky pleasures of invention--are not just artifacts attached to the poems; rather, they are vitally informing partners to every lyric excursion. Rekdal's large voice is as capable of interrogation as of thunderstruck awe, and her spacious poetic site contains--it requires--chaos as well as shapeliness, irony as well as affection, velocity as well as entropy. If these poems prove that we 'help erode the things we want / to illuminate, ' they also resist that proof with every fiber of language.

In A Crash of Rhinos reason and the uncensored disclosures of excited speech coexist with astonishing intensity. The American language seems suddenly, single-handedly revitalized. The poems are passionate, sexual, demonic. They are ceaselessly inventive. They are beautiful.