"Floating City" Soars

Floating City, Anne Pierson Wiese's premier release and winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, is more than deserving of such acclaim. Despite the childish praises on the back cover ("Floating City is a super debut!"), the book's interior shines brilliantly and explores the shadows it creates.

The book is a concept collection; every poem is a poem of place, and the place is New York City. Wiese carves into the city's core, exposing natural mysteries that hide beside the megalopolis' sidewalks and streetlights.

St. John the divine,
listed in every guidebook yet seeming always
like a momentary vision on Amsterdam
Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone
steps ascending directly out of traffic.

And we do transcend the hubbub of the streets, but first Wiese plays to our notions of metropolitan life, starting her poems like guided tours that both orient and confuse, as we shoot quickly through a 5th Avenue blur of pastry shops, subway stations, and street signs. She trivializes the taxi-window view of the city, not giving us cause to brace for her clever shift from the surface to the deep.

Under the streets
We flock together, fleet and half tame
as rare birds loose in a cavernous
pet emporium, returning for the night
To their rows of pagodas.

By the time we've read "pagodas," it really doesn't matter where we are anymore. The city and all of its neon sterility is transformed into hallowed emotion and history, and we happily trail just behind Weise as she leads us through parks, gardens, and cathedrals that all have a secret to tell. She helps us to penetrate the facade of New York, and we find an inviolable force no skyscraper can overshadow.

Gentlemen, here is a substance
we cannot move...The old maples and oaks,
plumbing the hill as humans could not,
whisper of what's below: more rock- more rock- more rock.