The Do-Over

“How do you stay in heaven?” Ossip asks, “Is it a kind of sophisticated rewind?” Her third collection of poems is haunted by the idea of ‘rewind,’ and especially by the teasing possibility that we, too—like the moon, like a plant—may be granted cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The book's overarching narrative is the death of the poet’s stepmother-in-law, a cherished, loving, eccentric woman who returns to its pages again and again.  But in spite of its focused grief and ontological urgency, The Do-Over is a varied collection—short acrostics mourn recently dead cultural icons (Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Donna Summer); there's an ode to an anonymous Chinese factory worker, three “true stories” that read like anecdotes told over drinks, and more. The Do-Over is an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure, a fragmented portrait of its difficult, much loved subject. It's also a snapshot of our death-obsessed, death-denying cultural moment, which in Ossip's gifted hands turns out to be tremulous, skeptical, unsure of ultimate values and, increasingly, driven to find them. “I am still studying, aren’t you?” she begins. Readers will eagerly embrace the surprise, humor, and seriousness of her quest.

It may be the case that Ossip understands the elasticity and capaciousness of contemporary poetry better than anybody. Her poems bubble out of what Seamus Heaney called "the word hoard," which has grown, lately, beyond the primordial mulch of language to include the impossibly overlapping registers of the Internet and mass media, along with all the basic grunting and cooing of the human condition. By which I mean her poems are fun and deadly serious at once... 

—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR 

Though they sound nothing alike, Ossip ended up reminding me of Sylvia Plath, who appears in the book on multiple occasions and lingers as a kind of gravity, a magnetic attraction to experience so strong that language bends almost past sense in order to get it right. ... 

—Jonathan Farmer, Slate 

Ossip writes to remember the dead...; to face her own death without panic, if she can; to help us face ours; and to show how an aggressively up-to-date vocabulary — one that would make a lesser writer sound jaded, or bored, or distracted by pings from her iPhone — can fit the most serious of poetic concerns. The Do-Over ... gives us traditional mourning and glib modern language simultaneously, then lets the dissonance jangle and ring. 

—Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review 

Working in acrostics, chain verse, prose, couplets, quatrains, Ossip's a magpie who pilfers from magpies... she has an eye for "the light of the culture: gold and misleading" and an ear that saves her wisdom moments from bluntness: "I see the forest, I see the trees. / What I can't see is the / dappled clearing I'm standing on." And then she devastates you by removing a single letter from a common poetic word: "In the clearing, the now is falling." 

—Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune