“There’s an unfakeable spontaneity in Nicholas Lea’s poems that I love, an ecstatic recklessness that signals not just the arrival of a bright new talent, but also makes a strong argument for something actually new. Read these poems, then read them again. Embrace and mistrust them—especially when they seem, at first, too casual or too smart. Take them on, grill their author about them if you get the chance. But between the shifting dunes of meaning, enjoy the sharp mind tracking what’s momentarily real, what John Ashbery has called “the experience of experience,” the uneasy rhythm and sudden surprise of these odd, dangerous times: “I had a dream about a town: the trees were uncanny, the plot was knotty…”—Kevin Connolly