RaveThe Georgia ReviewThe universe, in its expansions and contractions, seems wholly contained in The Glass Constellation, Arthur Sze’s eleventh collection of poetry, which gathers, along with his newest poems, the entirety of his previous ten books. Yet Sze’s poetry, as a poetry of paradox, is the opposite of containment—it is, as the universe is, an ever-expanding web ... Many of Sze’s poems are built from juxtaposing unlike moments; an experience or image will flash on and into something else ... In the poetic worlds of Arthur Sze, no one person or thing takes precedence over another; there is no hierarchy in what is seen or experienced ... How events, images, and experiences reflect and transform each other by their synchronicity is fundamental to Sze’s circular poetics ... The motion of Sze’s poems is a continuous, circuitous sweep between the microscopic to the expansive, from the first-person perspective—the “I”/“eye”—of the poet. This sweep, in its restlessness, still holds its balance at this tipping point. It knows that to channel desire into an exacting articulation risks changing the frequency of that desire ... Sze is a genius at maintaining clean grammatical shifts in time and place, like a figure-skater spinning through perfect landings and arcs, a singular motion stroke making a figure on ice and blade, or a water calligrapher ... This incandescent collection by one of our time’s most masterful poets is an invitation for us all to see ourselves, our lives, this earth, and one another in clear, attuned radiance, as hanging jewels, each absorbing and reflecting every other, on the \'infinite net\' that the poet calls consciousness.
