The Republic of the Husband

Lucy Tunstall’s striking début collection features a cast of characters ranging from Paul Muldoon and Marianne Moore to Aunt Jane, who fell in love “in 1956, or thereabouts,” and Cousin Gillian, who keeps the family’s long-case clock in her caravan. Using a variety of registers and forms, including dramatic monologue, lyric, collage, and found text, Tunstall explores poetry’s negotiations of truthfulness and theatricality, accuracy, and artifice. Perceptive and humorous, but never sentimental, she reaches into the deep emotions that lie beneath inhibition and the conventions that govern ordinary and extraordinary lives.