Nick LantZ  /  poet

Nick Lantz knows the blades and shrieks and pleasures and sweet sick twists in our human hearts, in our early-21st-century video-crazy and politically screwed-up human hearts, and his booklength bestiary is a way of forcing us to look, hard and long, in our own mirrors. Poem by poem, book by book, he is becoming one of our time’s best poets, and a piece like “Polar Bear Attacks Woman…” is a poem for this moment in the way Auden and Yeats and Rich and Dickey and Komunyakaa gave us poems for their moments. Tragic and funny and wise and deft, You, Beast is a zootopic book you’ll want to hold repeatedly in your homo sapiens hands.