In The Algorithm of I, Jack Crocker holds up a mirror to the human condition whose reflections, while intensely personal, are timeless in their search for an essential self. Thinking of the three great and simple images in whose presence the artist’s heart first opened—“the gospel womb of Delta dirt,” his “father’s walls,” or “Linda Boykin’s lips”—the speaker tracks himself in the multiple selves orbiting the center.

The chronology suggests a constant state of becoming. From the “ancestral prison” of birth to being “Programmed between the contradiction of predestination and the hubris of free,” imagination becomes the way to reconcile life’s painful dis-equilibrium between the aspirations of hope and inevitable concessions to despair. While every leaf may be “a tongue of grief,” “spring revives the beauty of death.”

But like “spiraled genes a Monet has laced,” it is less sadness that draws us to these poems than the osmosis of intelligence and heart that shines through so brilliantly. Like his hero Sisyphus, “step by completed step,” the poet’s revenge is stronger than his rock, giving and vitalizing. Compelled to make art out of “the seeing of doubt” he arrives at cautious hope as “The battered atoms of the heart go on arranging themselves/in the possibility of human love and revolt,” seeking truth “in the light of pretend.”