“Too much talent colliding with ambition can’t help,” Standard Schaefer writes in his debut book of poems, Nova. And it’s these moments of wry humor that coax the reader, in little starts, into entering Standard’s own intense word-logic.

In Nova, more often than not, you’re responsible for your own meaning-making. Yet the poems also have their own internal logic, created by an odd scientific language — complete with footnotes and an pseudo-narrative of recurring characters, images, and action, an obsession with the gist and grit of things. And again, humor. The footnote for the word “foam”: “Our lather who is in curved and thick space, hollow is the sequential advance echoing through your name.”

Which is not to say the poems are abstracted, or mostly a linguistic play — though the playing is there. It’s there on the tactile level, what you feel on your skin, and beneath it:

But after the games of chance,
chance

what summates along the cilia
the sting of no one’s exactly after you

while below
heat, light,and motion for a pageant.

My favorite part is the short series of poems collectively titled “Ovalness,” which serves as a sort of paean to imperfections, a coming to terms with the ovalness of the self, of one’s writing:

“No more remorse about this shape you’re in or the indifference to,” beseeched a musty little orb, “A circle must not be allowed to lament its having been penned flimsier than a sphere.”

Books like these make me wonder why I read poetry, and if I in fact enjoy it. I think I do it because it requires a certain precise attention, sharpens thought to a single, obsessive focal point — a little vacation from the usual run of variagated ruminations. It’s like falling into an iced pool. Or a quiet starvation. “A habit of sky, gist, and grit.”

The carpet is covered
with a map of the carpet.

Yards and yards of why
would you ever
go out again