Montreux Rotholtz’s debut poetry collection, Unmark, is puzzling, and like all good puzzles, it challenges the puzzler to slow down and take a hard look. To pluck out a corner from a pile of pieces and lay down an edge. I’m reminded of Mary Szybist’s abecedarian “Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle,” which begins: “Are you sure this blue is the same as the / blue over there?” Unmark asks this question again and again, as Rotholtz probes the connotative and emotional power of the given gestures and objects. Under her discerning floodlight, nothing is sanctified or pure—not girlhood, not beauty, not landscape, not dogma: “Blight of crop / becomes blight of fields becomes just blight.”
