In Transit

In Transit, Nicholas Pierces debut poetry collection, charts the poets maturation across three sections, each centering on a different kind of love, from the pedagogical to the romantic to the familial. Form and subject are inseparable in poems that consider the complex power dynamic of an older man befriending a younger one, that draw on such classic texts as Platos Symposium and Homers Odyssey to make sense of the seemingly random encounters and missed chances that, as one poem puts it, make up a life. As the books title suggests, these poems take place on the move, in cars, on boats and planes. They find the speaker abroad, as in The Death of Argos, a sonnet sequence that invents a new configuration for the form. Above all, though, the poems of In Transit attempt to capture a world in flux, turning to form as a stay against the transitory nature of experience.