At first glance, Laura McCullough's new collection of poems, The Dancing Bear, seems almost ungainly, with an entropy of formal architecture, a bottleneck of epigraphs and a deeply human longing, unmediated and stripped clean of the lyric precision typical of contemporary work. The frontal image of the poem, the dancing bear, gestures simultaneously toward the fanciful and the primitive, which seem perfectly cast as representative of the extremes facing the poetÑher intelligence, performance, perhaps even tricks, balanced against her instinct. McCullough's title poem, rather than serving as a pivot or hidden signpost in the middle plains of the book, appears on the second page, and its epigraph takes the voice of Lorca's duende, the dark and mercurial spirit inhabiting the poet in the act of the poem. Lorca writes, "the duende is a power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept." McCullough's choice to invoke the duende, an elemental presence, lends flesh to the confidence of her poetic voice. She puts forth the question in this poem, "What are the demons / to be grappled with // and how do we meet them?" By casting this seminal question outside the first poem or the frame of the collection itself, the poet signals to us that access to her book, in a shadowy replication of life, will not be easy. The entry is not well-lit nor the essence easily condensed.

Presence and imagery rise from the seeming artlessness of open statement and formal versatility. From quatrains, tercets and couplets, from stanzaic unevenness and from single blocks of verse with short lines and long lines that deny expression in a single breath, McCullough conjures trauma and grief. Unafraid of the prosaic terminology of horror, she portrays rape and dismemberment in "In the Shadow of Rain," and evokes mercilessly the everyday use of suffering in "What Makes a Plane Fly" and "Physics and Grace." Her pairing of such broad and beautiful concepts, as Lorca might say, serves only to illuminate the struggle of the poet's duende to evince "griefs peculiar to each of us: a curb-side / morning when a good drunk finally went bad, losing / a baby the day the Towers fellÉ" Her layering of the quotidian over the memorial resonates throughout the collection, in this and other poems. The stunning portrayal of stillness at the center of pain and remembrance and its ability to throw us off balance, lives even in McCullough's syntax and line breaks in this poem, as in "like New / York City, the day after: everything that doesn't die rises."

McCullough does not shrink from the bold gesture, even when it means challenging the expected answer or measured rhythm of things. As the break that severs "New" from "York City" in the lines above demonstrates, she uses fragmentation to signal that we as readers must mine her poems for what may be joined together and affirmed. Reading and suturing become twin impulses, because McCullough is not afraid to leave unadulterated emotion hanging on an unclean line break. In "Sky is Just Another Word," she leaves us, breathless and disoriented, on the penultimate line of a single word, "unless." Even after continuing on to the final line, "I walked away," we are left to return again and again to the reversible hinge of "unless."

Beyond sorrow, McCullough appeals to cultural threads of controversy, religion, love and sexuality to map the geography of the in between, the unexpected yet familiar. In "Cochlear Implant," she contributes to ongoing debate in identity politics, but at the most basic level, by asking, "should the deaf remain deaf?" This question seems imbued with the poet's sense of broader conversation, namely the politics of the senses and poetics. Later, in "Dissenting Angles," she indicts and reifies the ephemerality of social activism by likening the voice and laughter of protesters to winter, "ice angling off a / sloped roof graceful and impermanent." Elsewhere, McCullough reveals religion and spirituality as another incarnation of human momentum. In "Religion is the New Black," she writes, "It isn't religion, but water / and a horizon like a precipice / off which we could dive." In the subsequent poem, "What We Leave Behind," she returns to sensuality as a political, poetic engine: "the senses are the window / sills on which we rest / the cups of our knowing."

Borrowing an epigraphical voice from Albert Einstein, McCullough drafts love as a reversal of vectors or a realignment of forces. In "Residue," such a shift produces a state where "gravity means nothing / and the lightness of mango / could change everything." Sex, like love or perhaps artistry as well, comes to equate the absence of secrets. In "Rise," a lover stands in for the poet's mystery: "he became the reliquary / of my secrets. Shame is only what is held / back." McCullough reserves true mystery and communion for the moment before release, when "we are both full, smooth, taut balloons, / ready to be let goÉ" Having explored the savagery and play of McCullough's poetic landscape, this moment before letting go, that short space for breathing, seems fully representative of the tension between what is quotidian and transcendent, embodying the unknowable paradox of the duende. She closes with two poems on adjoining pages, "Axis Around Which," and "Wreck Chaser," that mirror each other formally in their couplets. As the only formal reiteration in the collection, these poems stand out. They are calibrated to a perfect pitch, as appeals to death and its remainders, and in "Wreck Chaser," the "evidence that they were there" seems another way of saying the reader, speaking the poem.