Poetic Manifestation

This is a collection written for the people in the author's actual life, and it's most alive when it stops reaching for metaphor and just names them. The dedication to Shari Nobile and Nancy Nicolas sets the frame — two young women lost too soon — and the book keeps returning to that register of real grief and real occasions: a christening poem for Baby Reagan Alise, a baptism poem dated October 14, 2012, a silver anniversary toast, and the elegy 'Never Forgetting, A Lost Child' for Raymond Caroselli Jr., where the acrostic-style breakdown of OCD into 'Over Caring Diagnostics' and 'Raised Among Youthful Memories of Numerous Decisions' shows Nugent trying, however imperfectly, to build private meaning out of public grief. Lines like 'A picture frozen in time is a memorable piece, a reminder of / When he was here' aren't polished, but they're doing the actual work occasional poetry is supposed to do — giving a family something to read aloud at a service or a milestone.

That's the reader this book knows it's for: not a literary audience, but the people at the christening, the wedding, the wake, who want a poem written specifically for their day rather than a Hallmark card. 'This Your Baptism' and 'To Love. To Wed. To Become One.' both work in exactly that mode, functional and warm rather than ambitious. The haiku sequence (Night, Loser vs. Sweet, Unattractiveness) shows he did absorb his Brookdale workshop training in form even where the free verse pieces wander. Nugent's strength isn't control of language — it's showing up, sincerely, for the people he's writing about.