Rough Fugue: Poems

Betty Adcock brings fierce insight to her seventh poetry collection, Rough Fugue. Her elegant stanzas evoke bygone moments of beauty, reflection, and rage. “Let things be spare,” she writes, “and words for things be thin / as the slice of moon / the loon’s cry snips.” Adcock’s poems are often spare but never thin, shifting effortlessly from the eerie red of brake lights on a Texas highway to the fluorescents of an office building where a tired worker imagines a holiday in Spain.

Adcock refle...