Welcome to the neighborhood. Our List of Solutions by Carrie Oeding feels like an eccentric neighbor who shows up on your front porch with a pitcher of sangria and a plate of burnt sausages from the barbeque next door. And though we have been trained to act gruff and solitary, it's a pleasant intrusion because this neighbor has great gossip and secretly, down deep, we are lonely and want a visitor.

And the poems in Our List of Solutions are a pleasant visitor. They don't direct or pontificate.

They eschew both the staged epiphanies of the dominant lyric/narrative mode of the last century and the equally tedious aesthetic projectiness of the post-avant. They think and feel and leave it often, delightfully, at that. The epigram from Ray Carver hints at the book's aesthetics: "What good are insights. They only make things worse."

In keeping to that aesthetic, the subject matters of the poems seem quotidian, almost trivial. They muse on Roy's blue shirts. They sing morning songs to porch lights and evening songs to hair barrettes. They feel spontaneous, a bit off the cuff, though any good stylist will tell you that it takes a lot of work to get that messy hair look. But what comes out of this stylistic naturalness and rejection of epiphany is a closeness to the speaker not so much as wrangler of truth, but as a coconspirator in pleasure — a neighbor.

Like the work of O'Hara (a clear influence), the poems create a picture of a larger social world. The neighborhood is a literal neighborhood, but it is also a concept — the space and air the poems breathe. Yes, the poems do muse on who said what to whom, but the focus on social dynamics functions more as narrative placeholder for a sensibility and the stretching of the lyric impulse than true subject matter. In "The Last Barbeque We Had" the author obsesses over the pleasure of being around a girl named Angel, but the poem becomes less about Angel and more about pure celebration and appreciation: Angel is a person, but moreso a location for the meandering existential joy which is the real heart of the collection. Oeding actually quotes O'Hara for the book's second section epigraph: It feels like an apt epigraph because this collection is all about "signs of life." People's faces loom large as an idea in the book as signs of life. Faces — those signs that we as humans are preprogramed to read with a hundredfold more interest than any book. Section III in "Prelude to How the World Works" consists just of the line "Look a Face!" typed over and over again in a big block paragraph: It's not just "Look, a face." It is "Look, a face!" The exclamation point denotes the celebratory urge, the lyric impulse, that shocking moment or recognition reminiscent of Pound's petals, of seeing your own existence by reflection in the other. What is an exclamation point? It's a downward slash of emotion over the single point we use to signify the end of a thought. It's a mark of celebratory emotion that, like Whitman, has its roots in reverence, or like Dickinson in ecstasy.

This collection is filled with signs of life no matter where they are found. Usually this joy is found in the quotidian. Notably, Oeding is inspired by barbeques. And why not? Barbeques are lovely things—especially how Oeding constructs them—the flow of people, the casual eating, the observation of life's happenings. Once can feel the open air that fills these poems, the sunshine, the tinge of smoke, and the electricity of people talking. I love the temperament of this collection. It is filled with joy, but lightened by a healthy distance from too much investment or obsessing. Oeding holds the world lightly to show she cares.

Formally and stylistically, the poems build on the natural repetition of internal dialogue, the zig-zag and lateral leaps of natural thought. Some injustice is done to them by chopping them up into lines or sections because they are less like a house that can be reduced to its bricks, and more a cool breeze on a hot day. But Oeding does have moments of nifty leaping on occasion like at the end of the poem "Joy": That ending image of looking at the open hand and smiling so nicely sums up the aesthetic project of this book, and its poems that are less heavy reflection or aesthetic plodding and more genuine rendering of experience.

Most of the book sprawls and celebrates, but in a few of the shorter poems Oeding manages her silences artfully to create lyric pause. Listen to the careful silence of "When the Neighborhood's Asleep": This book has that tension of a universe that hasn't been pinned down quite yet. The light in these poems is both wave and particle. It's a collection that exists in experience, not a safe distance away intellectualizing and steering, those heavy tools that crush what they should dust.

The collection isn't all lively cascading and lyric pause. Occasionally it does indulge in a trope, like "Lullaby For The Barrette" where some of the collections larger thematic projects are brought to the surface: The book struggles with this inner and outer. The barrette pulls back the hair from the face, but it's an artificial thing that inevitably rips some hair out with its teeth. If there is a little anxiety in this book it is in that image, but mainly the book triumphs over its aesthetic dilemma instead of indulgently rolling about in it. I want to wave this collection at a dozen others I've read this year and yell, "Do it this way! You're trying too hard."

The image that kept arriving in my mind when thinking about these poems was a bouquet of wildflowers, hastily picked off the side of a road in high summer, the many-varied joys, the mix and mess and beauty of the wild-grown, natural, plucked hastily, and fastened by only a hand. Well, now I'm waxing poetic. And this collection will do that to you because it is such a pleasure to be around that its light is infectious. Anyway, I'm excited for you to meet Carrie Oeding. She'll be at the next barbeque. Just stop by with your bowl of Mexican potato salad and your seven-dollar bottle of Trader Joe's wine, genuine and willing to be yourself. You'll have a great time.

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