The arrival of two books in as many years from the restlessly brilliant Sarah Menefee ought to be occasion for big celebration. Her lyric meditations on revolutionary love hover through the laundromats and bus stations of the American West, in potential appeal to all. But because she has been criminally underpublished since the appearance of her earliest books in the mid-90s, her admirers number a small, ardent group made up mostly of other poets, artists, musicians, and left activists in San Francisco, her beloved home of over three decades. I hope these two books find her work a wider audience.

Menefee's poems remind me of a line of Agnes Martin’s: “I would rather think of humility than anything else.” They share a certain humility with Martin’s paintings, along with a laconic good humor, and a kind of demotic common sense. A steady hand, in both cases, guides carefully simple human lines—softly precise, graceful and flinty—which a lazy observer might think are easy to make. Both, however, are masters of their respective arts (though they keep it inconspicuous), and to anyone who slows down and takes the time to look, it’s clear there’s nothing remotely easy about making art as immediate and gorgeously felt as this. There is a minimalism at play in Menefee’s poems, just as there is in Martin’s paintings, but that’s just an academic category. The work is wilder, wider, more generous, generative, and subversive than that.

In Menefee’s poems, love finds its first forms in humility—which is ethics in a sense, different from but adjacent to an aesthetic of minimalism. One might evolve out of the other. Love’s lived reciprocities find shape as a couple serendipitously turns on the TV to a WC Fields movie, right after talking about him: “a one time miracle” . . . “laughter waits nearby.” Or love between coworkers shows up in the stink of flounder (“from B&M Mei Sing / on Second St”), cooked in the break room during a long shift. A work crush, or maybe just a close work pal—it’s ambiguous, and beside the point. Love forms in workaday boundaries of real life, and bends them until she and we watch them gradually, decisively dissolve away.

In There You Are, Menefee ends the poem “Love Songs” with the couplet “I loved for a single night / of the cicada’s cry.” Love’s eternity can dilate this smallest of intervals. Like Lorca, she writes a dark strain of love poetry: surreal, sinuous, and subtle. Of the two books, the shorter There You Are runs directly through these short love lyrics, in which time inhabits multiple registers, while the ‘You’ of the title feels somewhat consistent. Its timeless theme turns momentary—in love’s very smallness is the marvel of its repeatability, its endless variation:

Holy Eel, on the other hand, charts more varied terrain: through lyric love poems, but also as the mind runs its course over memories of a longer life lived. Where There You Are flashes through a romance—sacred, secular, or both—Holy Eel maps a big country in which love plays one part. Here we find religious poems; long remembered pieces of life returned to, smoothed over time as a hand-worn stone; poems of astonishment and awe at beauty's fleeting dailiness. There are direct poems of place alongside lots of poems about people, some named, some nameless; there are great poems brimming with righteous anger at injustice, poverty, ignorance.

Menefee shares with Lucia Berlin certain concerns: the down and out, the luckless and dispossessed, the barely employed. For many years she worked as an activist for the homeless (as well as—a salient bio at the end of Holy Eel informs us—an artists’ model, a dancer, and a daycare aide, among other positions). Life on the clock, a life of precarity, pervades the book. At a point when the phrase “social justice” is overused to the point of near meaningless abstraction, and where the leftward gesture has become a mindless reflex in certain circles, it is deeply exhilarating to encounter a book where a true politics of the left is indelible in the poems as a result of having lived out its implications. For these poems, life on the left is a matter of survival, and mutual aid a given. The first person singular gives out into the first person plural, or even blooms from narrator into someone else entirely. Everywhere, the poet finds collectivity:

The nameless folks who share space with the poet as she moves through the city are her. They share her needs, for food, shelter, and comfort; they share her grief and anger at injustice; they share her drive toward love. All of the titles in Holy Eel are lower case, with the exception of certain proper nouns which feel carefully chosen: “Reno” (Menefee’s hometown); “May Day” (aka International Workers’ Day); and “Bob K” (Kaufman, whom she knew), for example. There are others, but the impulse to list most things in lower case indicates a perspective on the world in which things are most luminous in their very smallness, in their capacity to get lost, in their humility. Other things (names) stand out. To quote D Boon of the Minutemen, “real names be proof.”

But Menefee’s a poet, not a short story writer, and though the poems share Berlin’s insistence on a tough-humored commonality, and on poverty in all its forms, they are written with a clarity and concision reminiscent of Lorine Niedecker. Like Niedecker, these poems bravely risk being overly quotidian (and, more to their point, make you wonder if there could even be such a thing). Poems on the mundane quality of the mess are set beside koan-like meditations that give over, in their brevity, to lush, dazzling combinations of words and images. A poem about the disappointment of a badly made (or mis-ordered) sandwich is followed by a poem where “buildings are a / wilderness of lives / windows of wild eyes / / and no one knows their hour.” The effect is something more than experimental, where the poet pushes the slightest complaint, or most ordinary pleasure, right up against a moment “before I go / and out beyond / the end of thought.”

These books shift pitch, insistent to be read at different speeds, in varied light. The short poems amalgamate into a cumulative perspective which nevertheless deflects the grandiose, and they change with each reading. Menefee is keenly aware of poetry’s wildest possibilities—for example, in one poem a human body breaks forth “into lilacs”—but she uses that magic in a gorgeously spare way. Formally, there is the almost but not-quite hidden lyricism; the internal and slant rhyme, along with certain simple typographic decisions which she uses to great effect. Some poems conclude after an emphatic break: “room,” for example, in which the poet picks up a stargazer lily that’s been abandoned on Market street, returns after a length of silent space to a view of the flower seller, who “pushes his cart / through the winter rain.” I read these poems afternoons listening to Kitty Wells and doing scratchoffs in a dim bar, and I also read them quietly to my wife late at night as our kid slept. They’re for pretty much anybody, here most anytime. Sacred and profane, wise, tender and tough.