In her fourth book in three years, Courtney Bush tunes herself to a new frequency, subordinating sense to language in an effort to receive something truer than either. The headlong, highly pressurized lines of her talking scrolls (a form of her own invention) read like transmissions from without—and yet, in them, one can still catch the strain of something familiar, heard in a new way. Here, Bush has distinguished herself as a poet capable of metabolizing the flotsam and jetsam of experience into poems of remarkable, and often surprising, insight. "What am I supposed to do with this garbage" one poem asks; "like every sacred thing I / borrow from pre-existing / sacred things," another begins, as if in response. —Jameson Fitzpatrick

Courtney Bush writes for those who don’t hate lucid feeling, who don’t fear honest experience, who are humbled in the presence of children. She enchants the word to say itself and makes the poem that can think. Reading The Lamb With the Talking Scroll, I feel invited to a register of faith concerned less with divinity or immortality and more with the kind of living that continues while holding death. —Laura Henriksen

Reading The Lamb with the Talking Scroll, I felt like a king whose jester was giving me endlessly convincing reasons to let go of what I thought was power—I laughed and I cried and I realized how deeply I’d been overlooking life’s fundamentals. If you want to be an agent in your own trajectory, then listen to what Bush heard in the devotion of her reception, about how “the world we live in is just an attempt,” and about the shape of thought and how to handle its hooks, enter its harbors. The lamb returns always to the end of language as language’s real beginning—a sight to see—and its attendant scroll records, in typically audacious fashion, the results of Bush’s moving ambition to keep an honest vow: “People are so impatient to be understood / They’ll change the meaning of what they say / I won’t do that anymore.” —Morgan Võ