At first glance, Carrie Fountain's Burn Lake (which was recommended to me by the poet Erika Meitner) appears to be filled with the kind of thing one expects to find in a first volume: poems of adolescent love, sibling twists and turns, separation from one's parents ("Childhood is like that / to a large extent, / isn't it? An ongoing lesson / in physics and disappointment"). Fountain maps her emotional terrain deftly, as in "Ordinary Sadness": "It's simple, like sugar-water, like the shadow / cast by the banana, which was an eager yellow yesterday / but went bad overnight on the counter." If that were all this volume contained—first-person, finely wrought explorations of how "We keep an untouched life beneath the one we've been given" —it would be enough.

But Burn Lake is not, in fact, merely a collection of poems about adolescence and family. Fountain interleaves those poems with others that explore the geographical and historical landscape in which quotidian happenings happen. The landscape of Fountain's youth is New Mexico, and set among the poems about the narrator's girlhood trips to the mall are poems about the conquest of New Spain, poems about the carving out of the Camino Real, poems about colonial Spanish governor Juan de Onate ("I take and seize tenancy and possession, real and actual, civil and natural, one, two, and three times, … without limitations"). It is alongside and inside that story of "absurd" colonial violence that Fountain's understanding of childhood, love, sex, and family unfolds. The autobiographical and the historical press in on each other until they come together in the last poem in the book, "El Camino Real 3": "we're … walking / along the shoulder of the road / to the new liquor store for Cokes …. Beyond the store, the road gets thin / but doesn't disappear. As far as we know / it goes on forever."

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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