Many years ago, a writing instructor quipped to my workshop that the difference between a prose writer and a poet is that a poet will spend ten minutes explaining their work before they read it to an audience, and a prose-est will just get on with it. As a poet, that’s a stereotype I tend to balk at, though the three pages of “Author’s Note” and five pages of acknowledgements/endnotes that frame Jerry Lovelady’s lovely Other Worlds, in Other Words collection would seem to confirm, rather than dissolve my old instructor’s cliché.

Teasing about poets with a deep abiding need to explain their work (we just want to make sure you get it, okay?) aside, I do not exaggerate when I say that Lovelady’s collection is, by and large, lovely.

Tender, intimate, funny in places and painfully earnest in others, Other Worlds, in Other Words is in many ways four chapbooks in one, rather than a single collection. Helpfully parceled out into four parts by the poet himself, I must confess a particular affection for the low tempo and summer-heat that absolutely glows out of “Part Two: Slothful Miscreants”, but there are gems in each of Lovelady’s four quarters.

Written for lovers of modern myth and poetry, and devotees of Southern summer nights, I would recommend Other Worlds, in Other Words for fans of Jesse Bertron’s recent chapbook A Plumber’s Guide to Light, readers who enjoy the offbeat ramblings of Eileen Myles, and those who relish the kind of metaphysicality that a poet like Chris Ellery brings to his work.

Watch out particularly for “Squander the Day” and “Symphony in Crickets, Major” (from the previously mentioned "Slothful Miscreants" section), the tenderness of the two-part “Sitting at Her Mirror”, and the dark absurdism of the perfectly titled “Bread in the Mouths of Modern Gods and Other Dinner Party Disasters”.