paper • 126 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-56-4
eISBN: 978-1-961897-57-1
September 2025 • Poetry
In the Good Years
Laura Cresté
A high-lyric historian of the human project, Laura Cresté fixes her scrupulous gaze on the interwoven threads of this distressed anthropocene era, taking in the whole cloth of our globalized societies while recording the singular details of our individual lives and most intimate relationships—their intricate embroidery, characterizing stains, and fraying hems. In the Good Years confronts a painful family legacy, returning to the violent artistic censorship of Argentina’s military dictatorship, her relatives’ survival of a Dirty War death camp, and the scattered paths of their migration to safer ground. In reconstructing the past, Cresté resists the individualistic contraction of the coming of age model, not merely solidifying the psychological actualization of a single person as they enter adulthood but discursively expanding the notion of self, discovering the boundaries of identity as they overlay the seams of the broader world. These poems exist because of a narrowly avoided fate, and they bristle with the wild energy of improbable existence even as they touch on seemingly unrelated and often ordinary things: a roast chicken recipe, an aunt’s questionable romantic advice, flea-ridden dogs, high school parties, waitressing at a dive bar, drowned newts in the swimming pool, unruly tomato plants, horseback riding. “Once saddled across a mare / named Ramona, I was afraid of the burden of my body,” Cresté writes, fearful “that she would buckle—an animal once ridden into war.” The sheer brilliance of this book’s poetics manifest in lines like these, which bring political, personal, and ecological considerations to bear on the concept of weight in the space of a single sentence. What is the heft of a life that was nearly disappeared? How does a number become a weapon to enforce the gendered economy graphing desirability against power? What is the size of our footprint on this planet, and how heavy must our presence currently be as the animals and the land reach their breaking point? How much do you weigh? How much weight can you carry? “I was a teenager and jealous of the freedom / I imagined belonged to the thin,” Cresté admits. “Now I know no one feels free, // not even the creature who devoured / the countryside, ravenous for the time / we were allowed in the field.” This stunning debut champions that ravening, relishes the external and internal wilderness of the surrounding environment and our own human nature, and honors appetite as an opportunity to savor each bite for as long as we get to sit at the table. Throughout, these poems keenly subvert experience and memory, asking how we will remember this moment, and if the blessing of being here means we are somehow, even now in all the present’s suffering, living in the good years.
Overripe
Sometimes it’s like this: slugs
discover the basil no matter where it’s planted.
Batshit on the welcome mat. I cave in
the burrow between cherry tomatoes
and rosemary. Every day the chipmunks
dig anew until I fill the hole with sticks,
menacing as the Blair Witch.
After storms, I skim the drowned and stunned
from the pool. Today’s accounting:
one dead frog; newts: three dead, two living,
flung far from where the late tomatoes split
lewd as Jesus with his bloody heart.
Mike tends to never-ending tasks,
neatening the yard of fallen twigs,
while I believe in entropy and let it alone.
We drive to the farm with corn stacked on ice.
At the ignition turn, a chipmunk crawls
from the hood, and we confound each other
through the glass. A baby. Glimpsed
and then gone. I wish I remembered the look of it
as well as I do the frog—its terrible skin,
clear coating sliding off like jelly.
Bubble taut across its mouth.
When insurance stops covering my birth
control, I give it up and feel slightly more animal,
sore breasts, and more so when I trade plastic
for a shampoo bar and turn greasy from the coconut.
The radishes never take. Snakes undulate
in the pool and leave their skins behind
on the stone wall, flimsy dresses I’d shuck off
as I climbed drunk into bed for years.
The therapist in my phone asks
if the meditation he prescribed is helping.
Does it matter? I just need
the summer to end, for the garden
to die back a little.
There are books that stain you long after you put them down. In the Good Years is one of these books; it haunts you, in the best ways, with its flea-ridden dogs, summers steeped in the self-knowledge of girlhood and honeybees and vexed familial lineages, the profound and profoundly painful moments of lives lived, shared, and shed. It’s not hyperbolic (I hope) to say that the whole world is here—but unlike the actual world, Cresté’s is cradled in pristine care, attention, and with language so deft and exact, it could have only been made.
In the Good Years offers a stunning archaeological dig of language, time, and intimacy. Cresté’s poems excavate tenderness and violence, the personal and the political, ecosystems and their destroyers, treasure and trash, history and the multiverse of futures contained therein. Each poem is a site of meticulous, gentle sifting, each line a careful curation of artifacts. Cresté’s radical attention unearths and re-earths, restoring context to its discoveries and finding homes for the unhomed. Breathtaking.
In In the Good Years, Laura Cresté forges a speaker attuned to historical and familial forces—a speaker ravenous for communion, a speaker who notices the distance between people, the gaps in history. Moving from childhood to adulthood, these poems radiate with a translucent interiority. I could feel the speaker’s emotional and intellectual growth, setbacks. Each experience, each glimpse of the world is rendered in precise and resonant language. In the poems that hold the dead and disappeared in Argentina, Cresté deftly braids familial narratives, political violence, translation, guilt, and survival into a tour de force that jolts the senses. Laura Cresté is a remarkable poet. I’m thankful for her first book.
“Airplanes from opposite windows in their twin beds.” “Bright smear across spoiled film,” with “no / choice left but to let the lit world in.” “The sea out of the sea.” Debts. Dan’s drunk driving. Egg sandwiches, “fur stuck to my tongue,” a good boyfriend who enjoys “that poem / you wrote about your ex.” An entire alphabet of the apparently ordinary made into lines that stand out like split geodes, from girlhood to quarter- or third-of-life crises, from “jelly shoes and jelly sandwiches” all the way up—or down—to wars and whales, “water welling gutters,” and years lost to health rollercoasters and generic Zoloft—here is a whole life that some of us recognize, portrayed in sonic palettes that never tire and rarely even repeat, and sparkle, and shine. If Laura Kasischke has an heir, she’s here, making do, throwing dodgy parties, converting demons into tentative friends with melodic hexameters or deviled eggs. Here, too, are the family legacy of Argentine rulers’ cruelty, the ordinary harm of patriarchy, lemons and oranges, love of one kind and love of another, and memory, memory, Argentina, New Jersey, basement floods, supermoons. Here we are, and by we I mean the poet and me and you, any of you. Join us there.