I was supposed to read something else today: a thick academic book, important for my research and an interlibrary loan that must be returned next week, a book that will be impossible to finish unless I gather my wits and get to it. Instead, I read Chelsea Coupal’s new book of poetry, U Alive, because I went to her launch this afternoon and was so excited by her reading that I couldn’t wait.

These poems are lovely, sometimes funny, more often suffused with a sense of mortality even though the birth of Coupal’s daughter is one of the book’s recurring themes. Grandparents die, a friend dies, an owl and a cat are poisoned by eating mice killed by rodenticide, an eagle poses with the blood of a rabbit staining its face. Many of these poems are about the passage of time, leaving adolescence behind and becoming an adult. Parenthood is the final marker of that process.

I noticed fixed forms here, racking my brain to remember the definition of a pantoum. The calendar poems—12 of them, another indication of time’s flight—seem to be Coupal’s own invention, and I predict we’ll see more of them in work by other poets. When I saw them, flipping through my copy (a preorder, it arrived last week), I asked my colleague, an expert on fixed forms of poetry who happened to be sitting next to me, what they were. “I think they’re supposed to imitate the form of a calendar,” she said, kindly not shaming me for my inattention. Of course: each one bears the name of a month as its title. The book covers a year, but a year of memories, not a fixed chronology. There are other forms of counting here, too; the body count poem “What’s Your Number,” for example. And I thought only old people were so attentive to how little time is left. “We are all walking past / the rust of the past, walking / into dust,” Coupal writes in “Bone Patterns.” Indeed.

What I love about books like this is learning about experiences I’ve never had and never will have: being a woman, growing up in rural Saskatchewan, navigating a world where I’m judged by my looks by sometimes predatory men (see “On My Appearance”) or my sexual availability, giving birth. Isn’t that the point of literature? I want to hear about the lives of people who aren’t like me. U Alive gives that to me, in lines that make me laugh and gasp out loud. Now I want to reread Coupal’s first book, Sedley.

It’s almost the end of poetry month. If you haven’t read any poetry yet, please consider looking for one you might like. Poetry has a reputation for being hard to understand (my students usually think that’s the case), but it doesn’t have to be. Try this one, for instance, which is included in U Alive. Where it gets strange, at the end, just listen to the music of the words without demanding it make immediate sense. But be careful—you might want to read more.