“Spool’s a year ‘written in threes’—its three word lines forming narrow columns or perhaps threads. ‘Thread’ is a word Cooperman explicitly associates with the lyric here and it is also Ariadne’s thread of rescue or at least return though, at times, ‘the tape is/broken now so / sick and sick.’ To change up the metaphor, as this poem does, Spool is a hive of words continuously active and also continuously threatened with a sort of colony collapse. Written in conversation with past greats such as Shakespeare, Milton, Hopkins, Spool is a way of inhabiting our present.”—RAE ARMANTROUT

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