A Night in Brooklyn

D. Nurkse's deeply satisfying new collection is a haunted love letter to the far corners of his hometown, Brooklyn, New York, and a meditation on the selves that were left behind in those indelible places.Here Nurkse brings alive the particular details that shape a life, in this case unique to the world of Brooklyn-a job at the Arnold Grill, "topping off drafts with a paddle" for the truckers who came in; the deaf white alley cat that mysteriously survived the winter on a stoop in Bensonhurst; the narrow bed where young love took place; the wild gardens behind the tenements. His exploration of this almost mythic city past is combined with a sense of the future speeding toward us-the ongoing riddle of time and being in a larger universe.. . . And she who was driving saidWe know the coming disaster intimately but the present is unknowable.Which disaster, I wondered, sexual or geological? But I was shy:her beauty was like a language she didn't speak and had never heard.From "The Present"