Thin Glass by Christine Degenaars is a collection with verve and sincerity, one that uses poems to gently smudge the translucent barriers that separate one human maturation point from another. If “good fences make good neighbors,” as Frost’s “Mending Wall” reminds, then Degenaars’ poems seem to ask, “What of windows?”

And if spring was “the mischief in” the speaker of Frost’s poems, then fall, for Degenaars, is the internal, revelatory, quietly recalcitrant season that motivates her speaker’s lyrical movement. A season, for sure, full of furtive desire, as the opening lines from the opening poem, “Stepping Out of Angel’s Share in Late July,” suggest:

Once again, I’m done up
            In a good-time-girl attitude, and there’s a man

who’s walking past, saying: how can I talk

            to any female, they don’t understand.
I want to grab his belt loop,

pull him by my index finger, curved

as if holding a trigger, and I want
            to hold it there, just long enough

for him to see what good comes

Though the title of the poem suggests a moment on the calendar that feels firmly ensconced in the dog days of summer, the poem’s formal movement, a kind of structured, visual equivocation — will I hold to this left margin or not? — feels like the contemplative aesthetics of autumn, where one is, perhaps, shifting from the recklessness of “why not?” to the fantasy of “what might have been.” In doing so, Degenaars triangulates desire, loss, and observation so that an emerging self might be seen as one sees a neighbor in an adjacent building. In this case, it’s a New York City apartment, with its consideration of proximity and almost “rent-controlled” weight of nostalgia.

Along with NYC’s landscape, the anchoring threads of Thin Glass include wrestling with both self-imposed and societal expectations. What does it mean to be a good daughter, a good mother, a good lover, a good poet? These questions hum in the white spaces among wonderful poems like “First Son,” where Degenaars writes, “I don’t think I like myself enough / to make two. Motherhood: a form / of vagrancy, no body my own,” and also in the recurring poems featuring the speaker’s fisherman father. Among those poems, the desire to become perceivable, to be “seen” fully, or at least honestly, is persistent.

That desire is then complicated by a series of five poems, “The Affair [Act I-V],” which lyrically document the fracturing of a relationship with a mentor or teacher. Whether in fiction or poetry, as a reader, I am often skeptical of narratives about affairs, as they can so easily slip into reductive tropes. But here, Degenaars wisely navigates that potential banality with deft gentleness and an easy-to-miss wit, both of which are on full display in the fifth poem in the series, “The Affair, Act V,” my favorite among the group. These stanzas from its middle are emblematic:

My mother said
no man with a wife
and another
can be honest
                      twice.

                                                Maybe you loved me
                                                and maybe not

Sometimes
Your wife rang
as if calling me home
            for dinner.

One can almost see in those lines a kind of convex-mirror image of “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” A dear friend in college once told me that she believed it was better to be known than to be loved. Thin Glass approaches a similar conclusion. “Daughter, there’s nothing worse // than a hidden kind of living,” Degenaars writes in the poem “The Dive Pool,” late in the collection. In many ways, that is the thesis of all debut collections, but few handle the concept with the grace achieved by Thin Glass.

I think readers will see themselves and their own possibilities when reading these poems and reckon with the consistent maturity of observation Degenaars brings to her verse. Perhaps, to speak to what a fantastic book Thin Glass is, I need only ask myself, “Would I read this again?” In response, I must answer as the poet herself does at the end of her poem “First Daughter”:

“I would. I do.”

Steven Leyva’s latest poetry collection is The Opposite of Cruelty.