Loose sugar / Brenda Hillman.

In the poem that gives title to this collection, "sugar, precious, warm, quickly used up, and easily lost" is a metaphor for time. Sugar was the rare commodity that brought borrowers to the door of Hillman's barely remembered childhood home in Brazil: "Later the rest of my life-time resembles warm sugar, something almost imaginary having to do with asking." Underlined by the book's section titles "space/time," "time/alchemy," "problem/ time," and so on, is the telescoping conceit of time, deceivingly abundant in personal recollections of adolescent sexuality in Southwestern U.S. suburbia, or impossibly scarce in the present complexities of family and work: "sex grows rather dim sometimes/ doesn't it but it comes back." The experimental nature of much of these poems seeming to emerge from the compulsion to "stop making sense" in the traditional fashion takes the writer into the margins of her page with poetic counterpoint in fine print, parentheses enclosing blank spaces, mind-bending quotes from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and other departures from linear narrative. And although some readers may tire of the ride, many will nevertheless be attracted to this West Coast poet, whose humor and irony never fail to shine through.