The Angel Notebook.

As a playwright, poet, editor, and designer of handcrafted chapbooks, The Angel Notebooks is Luciano Iacobelli’s first book-length publication of poetry. Four separate and densely textured sections explore the intricacies of existence, which include otherworldliness, language and silence, mysticism, and memory and grief. As Iacobelli experiments poetically with those complexities that Susan McCaslin voices in her more contemplative tone, Iacobelli’s readers will be required to work through his strange juxtapositions as they are swept along in his rhythms.

Iacobelli’s surrealism captures the imagination throughout the various sections. In the first one, “Angel Notebook,” the poet glimpses an ephemeral other realm within this world, in the scent of a breeze, the taste of cherries, or the human breath, and writes, “[w]ith a pointed stick / I slice open a wind’s belly / a dozen new angels fall out / thanking me for the caesarean birth” or “[h]eaven’s favourite angel is not child or garden / is transparency stepping in and out of lungs.” In Part II the poet wonders “if language is the house of being / then what happens when I stutter.” In a philosophical inquiry into language—and silence—Iacobelli expertly plays with words and sounds, as in “Forgotten in the Lilies,” a “stuttered prayer” of cascading rhythms. The third section, perhaps the most abstract in the book, is devoted to the mystic experience expressed in erotic metaphor and often violent imagery, while the fourth, in sensual metaphors, is a return to the poet’s childhood where memories of lost loved ones will “open your chest like a house key,” and these poems will, undoubtedly, most fully resonate with the reader.

The Angel Notebooks entices the reader with evocative and expressionist-like meditations and keen observations about the disparate facets of being human—the tangible and intangible. Some of the poems’ daring line breaks distract now and then, but the poet’s arrangements further his purpose: the book’s sections come together as a coherent whole rather than as four separate volumes to reflect the inherent multifarious and mysterious nature of human being that underpins Luciano Iacobelli’s gorgeously crafted poetics.