When Pattiann Rogers picked Corinne Lee’s book Pyx to be published as a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series, she cited its “original and engaging music.” Indeed, the first book of this Iowa Writing Workshop alumna, is vibrantly different. As Rogers also points out in her introduction, Lee is a master of mixing references and lexicon: the mythical and maternal, and the literary and lowbrow are brought together in lovely, quirky fusion. Thus Lee is able to write about marriage, children, and domestic life with stunning freshness. Like a gourmet’s savory ice cream, Pyx has an unfamiliar flavor and texture that you can’t quite wrap your tongue around, and yet even so, you realize that it’s something sophisticated, daring, and possibly even delicious.

Pyx is a collection divided into four sections, entitled Terranean, Median, Ascension, and Empyrean. Fittingly, Lee follows this elemental movement upwards thematically in the organization of her work, albeit rather loosely. Throughout this movement, it becomes apparent that Lee is steeped in references ranging from the classical to the scientific, and her pages are decadent both in language and in reference. The remarkable (and wonderful) part about this is that she is unafraid of leaping from a mention of Lysistrata to a mention of Rastafarian and then on to cerebrums. Her language is teeming; she is a writer not content unless her adjectives, verbs, and hybrid words of her own creation are practically jumping off the page, vibrating like electrons. Grass sashays, a bird outside “woo-warbles chants like wicks,” and the children fill the house with “slumbermutters.” As a poet, Lee obviously loves to startle. Sometimes this leads her to passages of surreal yet awkward accuracy, and it sometimes even leads her to moments of succinct prescience, as in these lines from her poem “Abduction Certitudes”: “…and the antique way/ we will someday make love/ skulks among us now.”

When Lee strikes it just right, she leaves your ears ringing. She does just this in a poem like “What of the Alluvial Priests,” a small lyric about the all-consumingness of babies, how “there is no escape/ from the dominion of little, its pecuniary parliament/ and constant oracular kisses.” Or in “Failed Ambush against Flamingoes,” which ends as such, “Remember, there was no retreating,/ only celebrating, on the long ago days/ our wombs, like hyacinths, became starred.” Few poets have exploded the joys and weariness of motherhood and marriage into something so enchantingly unfamiliar and yet accurate. Lee takes the crying baby, tired body, mundane crises of lost time, marital conflicts, and aging, topics that could easily devolve into cliché, and explores them from the odd angle, or takes a microscopic view that is as precise, enlightening, and detailed as it is new. Just as the divisions of the book start at the terranean and ascend, Lee’s poems only grow stronger.

Perhaps the only danger of being as adept a poet as Lee is that occasionally there is the danger of the occasional poem unraveling at the stress of its own strange language. At their worse, Lee’s lines could veer towards the gnomic and indecipherable, rather like fortune cookie messages written by a stoned, hyper-articulate undergrad in some hazy three a.m. dorm room. These moments, however, are vanishing and rare—for the most part, Lee is poised just within her own limits. Even when a stanza strains literal logic, it is carried forward by the logic of sound, the logic of dream-accuracy, and the logic of deadly precise language. Pyx is truly ambitious, and it is a remarkable tour-de-force from a newer poet from whom we will surely hear more.