Allyson Paty, Jalousie

 

at the center of the bridge
high ridge and contour

of the land
past the banks

my father
without fail:

imagine sailing onto this

Lenape hills

1609, Henry Hudson
on the Halve Maen

vision opens
out, out

then Manhattan
the car subsumed

a knife of sky
no horizon (“In Medias Res”)

Winner of The Berkshire Prize for Poetry, as judged by Diana Khoi Nguyen, is New York poet Allyson Paty’s full-length debut, Jalousie (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2025). Having been aware of the strength and clarity of her work for some time (having produced a chapbook by her through above/ground press, after all), I’m a bit startled to be reminded that this is Paty’s debut, a collection of moments that lean into and against each other, facing out in multiple directions. “One renders what is happening / moves to say what has been,” she writes, to close the opening poem, “Along the Grain,” “A tenderness to walk the fault lines / and slip oneself in [.]” Paty’s lyrics are dense, precise and thoughtful, offering short moments around the present moment that accumulate and meander with deep and tender purpose. As judge Diana Khoi Nguyen offers, as part of her citation:

The title of this stunning collection refers to a window treatment which has rows of angled slats, like blinds or shutters, and Allyson Paty’s disarming lyric exemplifies a deliciously sharp perspective which at times ranges from being seen literally through partially-opened slats, the world at a slant, to confronting the mediations of how we tender our communications, representations of self, labor, and love. These are poems reminiscent of the cutting lines of Elaine Kahn and Elisa Gabbert, but these poems are uniquely their own.

There’s an element of the English-language ghazal to Paty’s lyrics, offering a leap between lines, between thoughts, as poems form out of what the individual points and peripherally-connected moments shape into, once you step back a bit. There’s such care to her lines, and a kind of casual flow, deep-set and intertextual and precise, with ever an eye on destination, even as she focuses on each moment across each journey. “In a patchy field / a man kneels down // pours water / from one vessel to another,” she writes, to close the poem “Decade,” “Grasses trail their fingers / an alphabet works through you // You draw a straight line [.]” Her poems are smart, and observational, wise and tender. I’m struck, as well, by the mantra-moments of an extended sequence such as “Premise,” each poem, each page, each line, beginning with the same word, offering an accumulation of seventeen pages, seventeen points, across a wide expanse:

Having returned to my desk

Having typed wedding dance into the browser

Having encountered a field of photographs showing white people in formal
dress move over lustrous floors

Having realized my mistake

Having added bruegel