One of Marianne Moore’s earliest published poems begins with the line “Art is exact perception,” a phrase that could act as subtitle for Adam Giannelli’s debut collection, Tremulous Hinge. This is a book to cure us of our blindness, hinging together keenness of eye and urgency of feeling, observation with imagination. Just look at Giannelli tackling a porcupine:

          Into pelt and sheen, rattans bond, tight-
slatted. At rest, sheaved
          from the front, it is wickerwork, canebrake,
                    quiver of arrows, but when
provoked, it erupts as bayonets, asterisk, threshing floor,
                              Cupid in a fury.

          Its strategy is not precision, but exuberance—
                    a briery boast. Let the arrows fly—
gold with lead. Florescent-
          quilled, in dark makeup, like the bass player
                    in an 80s band…

When since Moore’s pangolin or Bishop’s fish have we seen this kind of—and this much—precision, precision and exuberance, a quiver of images as sharp and numerous as the creature’s quills? There are five more stanzas like this. But I would happily take twenty. I’d take fifty if he could sustain such rapturous exactitude that long, which I think he probably could. Take “Hydrangeas” for example; nowhere outside Rilke has this flower been so lucky:

                    Water vessel—patina of summer—
          its zeppelins soar all the way
                    into September, the heads colored
like the flavored ice atop snow cones. Beside a driveway and a house,
          a few orbs, flamingo-like, float
                    on thin stalks. Others, laden
with bloom, rest, like tails of tired poodles, on the ground.

          Each mophead is a bevy, a beveled
                    blue, a standing ovation,
that fumes with lattices of spume, solid but fretful, like sleep.
          I never knew that ecstasy
                              could arrive at
                    so many angles. These breakers
compass an entire globe. Coming to fisticuffs, each scrub

                    clenches nebula and knuckle…

In moments like these Giannelli becomes something like the Van Gogh of poetry, spreading inch-thick paint, a gutsy, gaudy bravado meant to draw as much, or more, attention to the medium as to the message. And read in the context of the whole book, this thickness of application isn’t merely decorative, nor is it self-indulgent. It represents a hard-won triumph of language, a high-stakes construction of the self. The first poem in the book, called “Stutter,” introduces us to a speaker whose every word, every syllable, is strategic, and for whom no act of communication is frivolous or unessential:

since I couldn’t say tomorrow
I said Wednesday

since I couldn’t say Cleveland I said
Ohio
          Since I couldn’t say hello

I hung up

A mix of ars poetica and author’s preface, “Stutter” illustrates how these constrictions opened up new freedoms, new affordances of speech, a new kind of creative energy: “alone in my room / I can speak any word,” Giannelli says, and then goes on to prove it. Seen through the lens of this introductory poem, the rest of the book doesn’t feel so much like wordsmithing as word-feeling. Or even more: world-making, poems in which the full arsenal of language is being marshalled to map out the world, and thus increase one’s chances of surviving in it.

Despite the pomp of “Porcupine” or “Hydrangeas,” many of these poems are equally excited by the commonplace and plain. The opening of “The Shards Still Trembling” reveals a love of the colloquial:

As the parade goes by the park,
the woman next to me says
to her husband, I just want to hear

the bagpipes and then we can go.

Simple, but not quite. Just strange enough so that I’m hooked. We are a mile away from “Hydrangeas” here, and yet not. And that’s what’s great about this book, the way it lives up to the promise of its title by yoking opposites together, registers and objects that would normally be left to fly apart. Giannelli’s choice of epigraph is telling here, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Though it is true / that fire is the enemy of water, / moist heat is the creator of all things.” Like Marianne Moore, Giannelli makes art out of detachment, distance, exact perception, but insists as well on unabashed sincerity, real feeling, a vulnerability that is as level-headed as it is passionate: “The body in love / is like a jar of fireflies”; or: “since I can’t say everlasting / I say every /lost thing.” Keats says “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” Giannelli seems to say “why not have both?”

This comingling of opposites, of fire and water, leads to some of the books best gems. But there are rare occasions when the mixture feels off. In “Sealevel,” the poet seems to acknowledge this; we see him getting pleasantly nervous, trying to find the right balance of romantic and modern:

Last night I went back and removed all the angels
from my poems.
I singed their wings
                              and gave them names.
Now they wander the beach at Rockaway,
sunburned, far from home.

It’s when these fallen divinities are replaced with images of planes flying over Kennedy airport that I feel slightly let down:

One crosses overhead,
                              leaving a white girder in the sky.
You say, But I thought TWA went out of business.

TWA? The poem can’t quite find its tonal center of balance, and the next line swings the pendulum too far the other way: “Scintillate with white grit, the waves / fall one after the other.” There are rare moments like this throughout the book, when dueling registers refuse to mix, like oil and water. Mostly though, these kind of opposites trigger each other, like flint and steel; they’re how Giannelli gets his brightest sparks, how he convinces us he is the kind of artist Henry James extols, a person “on whom nothing is lost.”

To the book’s credit, this hyper-perceptivity also highlights the opposite, the truth that everything, eventually, is lost, no matter how good we are at seeing or speaking. As it moves along, the collection tips more and more into the elegiac, fulfilling the promise made in “Stutter” to say “every / lost thing.” The penultimate poem is “For Nashaly,” a fourteen-month old child, but instead of the splashy exuberance of life that characterizes “Hydrangeas,” we get something much more cautious, hesitant, resigned even, and all in the first line: “Already a cough roosts in your chest.” This isn’t cynicism—it’s a realism that makes these poems feel sturdy even as they tremble, even as they make us tremble, with emotion. It’s what grounds and tempers the book’s Romantic streaks, making its joy feel earned instead of naive.

Look at “Reflections” (another variation on the hinging theme), a poem consisting of a series of aphorisms structured as semi-anagrams or near-chiasms. But these lines aren’t just language exercises or games. They’re also cris de coeur, sincere calls for connection, microcosms of the book’s triumphant alchemy of head and heart, its wish to rescue what has been lost:

to gather the pieces and piece them together
…..

to turn to each other and hover between terms
…..

and gently nest the shores of shared emptiness

Here, and in much of the book, we experience the ideal collision between form and content, Ovidian shufflings reminding us that although all things change, nothing ever truly disappears.

This kind of linguistic wickerwork is more than flourish. A porcupine’s quills might look like decoration, but they serve a vital purpose: they warn predators not to get too close. They keep the heart beating. Likewise, poetry is a defense against what would annihilate us: change, time, absence, loss, “the brunt of love,” the hazards of language itself. Quite an onslaught. But in Tremulous Hinge, Giannelli faces it with bravado and exuberance. He’s Cupid in a fury, he’s a briery boast. He stands his ground. He isn’t going anywhere.