For fans of Campbell McGrath and Kaveh Akbar, David Greenspan’s poetry collection One Person Holds So Much Silence (out now from Driftwood Press) is a series of highly lyrical dispatches on addiction and desire from rural America with raw confessional speakers.

One Person Holds So Much Silence has teeth. Yellow teeth, gray teeth, and teeth “once pale as ghosts.” Never do we encounter the straight white teeth seen in movies about dinosaurs, space travel, or superheroes. Greenspan’s lines are fractured, enjambed, but still holding space. That silence he references in the title is doing serious work in the gaps between stanzas and the fracturing of the lines.

The collection opens on the image of a person’s palm cut on a fence “covered by frond rot,” and ends with a “tobacco honeyed mouth” and a “pignut hickory sky.” David Greenspan interrogates the body as a climate. His poems are barometers for very human moods and anxieties, hurts and healings, loves and discoveries. Daniel Greenspan’s speakers delicately excavate a way into what it means to live in skin that is both tender and resilient.

These poems are concerned with the earth and the dirt. They seek to form an understanding of the self by any means they can latch onto. We’re in Florida, Wyoming, and the Facebook comments section all at once. We meet a father who is both an insect and a piece of glass. David Greenspan is piecing together an idea of a self from a thousand different angles. More than just a portrait of the self, the result is a 3D sculpture. Our points of axis: jawbones, safety pin tattoos, and squirt guns.

Greenspan’s poetic vehicles are lyricism and form. Many lines feel like the sonorous vibrations of strings on a violin. But he doesn’t let the music distract from the mission; mixed in with the lyrics are very matter-of-fact statements that ground us and urge us forward. The logic is like a combination punch.

If you’re a fan of poems that simultaneously define and refuse definitions of what it means to be a person, then this book is for you. If you like poetry about Florida, fathers, and the kitchen sink—this book is for you. The voice moved me to consider myself in a different way by the end of the book. Time spent with David Greenspan is time spent with deeply gorgeous silence.

One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan, Driftwood Press, $14.99.

Parker Logan is an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University and the poetry editor of New Delta Review. Originally from Orlando, Florida, he has a BA from Florida State University. He resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he gardens and writes with his friends.