<div>“I guess an iceflow came through / to take the road,” writes Aaron McCollough in<i>Rank</i>, a richly strange sequence of poems in which forces of nature, mind, spirit, and language partake of each other in vibrant and shifting ways. “I can only guess that would / destroy these remains slowly,” McCollough continues. Indeed,<i>Rank </i>seeks to recover sources of imaginative meaning from the unsettled remnants of lyric tradition, seeking out possibilities for belief and sustenance in the echoes of lapsed poetic speech and song.<br><br>In language that is dense, allusive, by turns trancelike and mordantly funny, McCollough descends into the ranks of disintegrating organic life and finds elemental processes of regeneration underway, “ivy suckers climbing / the knock kneed craning bridge / to that bright food.” This is work that emerges in the aftermath of declining systems of hierarchy and order, a site marked by the overlapping of occult practices and postmodern physics, tense meditation, and economic anonymity. McCollough gives rise to a voice that is as much vegetative as human, as deeply embedded in the loam of cultural memory as it is new, original, and lavishly daring.<br></div>