Occasionally, I take an inordinate amount of time to get back to my reading list, even when a book of poems has thrilled me with an authentic first impression. Such is the case with Liza Hudock’s Reveille (Flood Editions), which I read a few poems from when it was published in 2025.

This collection, as some books do, remained on my nightstand for months and was then moved to living-room end table, to kitchen counter, to back seat of the car. I found myself carrying it everywhere, reading slowly — sometimes the same poem again and again — and always promising to finish it soon. I admittedly have taken too long to finish this outstanding debut, but maybe, as its title suggests, its signal to awaken is finding me at a moment when I am most ready to listen.

Hudock’s poems have a taut, wry way of singing syntax into image and epiphany, such that the glissando from forgiveness to humiliation happens within a stanza without pretention or uninteresting ambiguity. “I do not thrash on the line / and I do not bite. I hide / nothing from you,” the opening stanza of “Largemouth Bass” announces, and that seems a fitting way to think about the affects the book operates within.

Certainly, that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of tonal or formal variety; rather, there is an assuredness of imagination. Consider these opening lines from another poem, “The Pumpkin My Best Friend”:

I love a pumpkin for the same reason some people love a sonnet —  
it has the rough proportions of a human head…

Not only is that quite funny, perhaps in the tradition of Zbigniew Herbert’s “The Hen,” but it also sets up a situation in which the aforementioned pumpkin will serve as a Frostian avatar against a covetous neighbor’s desire for the speaker’s home to enter foreclosure. The poem comes to its apotheosis in these final lines:

As I said, it’s winter. The rind sags like it might fall
any day now. When it does, please let it land
on the hood of my neighbor’s truck.
Let the crows come.

Wry indeed, as far as curses go, but also a clear-minded wisdom and desire. The poem is so welcoming to the reader that it’s easy to fall under its spell. Of course, there is nothing easy about the craft at play, neither in this poem nor across the others.

Thematically, a dying mother haunts the collection, but “haunts” is an inaccurate word, and one that reviewers (agnostic though they may want to be) reach for far too often. A mother is frequently resurrected or awakened in these poems, whether through memory, anecdote, imagery, or euphony.

“She did not ask me for a mirror. She asked me for a match,” Hudock writes in the collection’s third poem, “Two Soldiers.” The doubling imagery of the speaker at her mother’s back and the doubling on the word “match” — as both the fire-starter and the equivalence of being — occur as a motif in different ways throughout the book. Sometimes, that doubling comes by way of substitutions of meaning, as in “Palm Beach”:

…If by death
he meant dread and by beauty
he meant relief and by mother
of he meant opposite of…

At other times, the doubling is a material fact of the speaker’s life. “I look enough like my brother that a stranger once called us twins,” Hudock writes in the poem “The Irish Hills.” Family relationships dominate the obsessions of the book, but this never becomes maudlin because of the exacting, sharp-witted voice. Yet, Hudock is not afraid to be vulnerable, either, writing, “can you love me? With time / compressed at it is,” in the final poem, “Storm.” To borrow from a now-dated idiom, Hudock does indeed have the range.

The aesthetics in Reveille retain something intensely working-class and so place Hudock, a Detroit native, within the tradition of another poet deeply associated with that city, Philip Levine. However, Hudock’s sensibility about how and when to write about the body — the poem “The Goat’s Hair” comes to mind — feels aligned with a different Detroit poet, Toi Derricotte. All and all, this is a debut that’s egalitarian in its scope, warm in its tenderness, witty in its critiques, and dedicated in its pursuit of truth.

Yes, there is wonder here, as August Kleinzahler mentioned in his blurb of the book. And, yes, there are also “quiet audacities,” as Daisy Fried mentioned in hers. Though I’m not sure I can add anything more, let me make the attempt. Reveille has all the urgency of a rescue boat searching for souls lost at sea. It seeks — out of both duty and faith — while believing there is something to find, while believing truth can be known. I should not have waited so long to let it find me.        

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