The suicide's son

"I believe in the power of original sin," writes James Arthur, "in the wound/ that keeps on wounding." Set against a backdrop of political turmoil in the United States, The Suicide's Son is about the complicated personal histories that parents inherit, add to, and pass on to their children. This is a confessional book of masks and personae, of depopulated landscapes haunted by history's violence, of speakers whose conflicted truth-telling is marked by sense of complicity in the falsehoods they glimpse around them. "I'm aging very slowly, because every part of me / is already dead," says Frankenstein's monster. With his formidable powers of observation and inimitable ear for the cadences of speech, Arthur shows himself to be, in only his second book, one of the best English-language poets writing today.