Trane DeVore's brilliantly seductive Dust Habit is, in part, an account of the habit of living, a habit that generates the garbaged treasures of our mortality. The book is also clairvoyant; the poems look forward, through debris and into the anticipation of pleasures and purposes that promise future to our thinking and speaking. The traces and treasures that are the subject and substance of Trane DeVore's poetry in Dust Habit are not vestigial meanings, then, but real, current, and meaningful marks of lived experience. And though the individual poems are often delicate in their beauties and precisions, the effect of the book in its entirety is torrential. Trane DeVore's account of mortality is a celebration of life.

--Lyn Hejinian

Like a bower of roses, Dust Habit hangs on the trellis of "Habit," a serial poem in many parts, much in the same way that Robert Duncan let "Roots and Branches" depend upon "Passages" and "The Structure of Rime." There's even a poem called "Passage" in Dust Habit, as if to make manifest the lineage. Trane DeVore has a resolute, puckish wisdom to him, unnatural in one so young, but gratifying and heartfelt nonetheless. In an age in which everything has to be "new" all over again, DeVore is thrillingly chivalrous and frank, and in the fair virginals of Dust Habit I feel Sir Walter Raleigh's velvet cape as it sinks through the mud into glory.

--Kevin Killian

Trane DeVore's Dust Habit enacts a poetics of earthliness. These often-disjunctive lyrics simultaneously uncover narratives and dissolve them, as readily visible images flow down the page: "a great blue heron in the reeds," a "polished brass doorknob/existing under the paint," "empty snail shells/checkering the streets." Coursing through these poems, and empowering them, are unadorned longing, despair, lust-and love that enters through the skin, like dust, disease, and perhaps "meaning." The poems' roots in the natural world-which stretches from the sea to the smallest components of animal or human bodies ("larynx, cochlea, ganglia,/iris, coccyx")-give the poems heft without diminishing their speed. This book is both confessional and alluring, a swift journey into the heart, not of darkness but of an all-encompassing translucency.

--Lisa Lubasch