Summary

"Stacks" is a chapbook that collects 19 small poems, all of which are connected by their being concerned with the idea of a stack — hence the title. Each poem is narrated from the ambiguous perspective of an omniscient third person speaker, and they appear in "Stacks" in the following order:

First comes "Stack of the Seas of the Moon in Alphabetical Order," which, as the name implies, lists all 19 seas on the moon in two columns: the left-hand side states the Latin name, while the right-hand side lists the English translation. Each English translation is pretty standard — "Mare Aliorum" is called "Sea of Others," while "Mare Marginis" is called the "Border Sea." The only translation that stands out is the name for the "Mare Tempestivitatis" — the penultimate moon in the poem — which Carson calls the "Sea of What Frank O'Hara Calls 'Cantankerous Filaments of a...