These poems are like the kind of laughter we laugh when we don’t have no way forward. In Arvo Villar’s collection, the poems, sometimes, are as this morbid carnavale, as automobile horns playing together in traffic: cascades of anaphoric spectacle. Then sometimes the lyric be quiet, and the silence there then is sighed, the same way the blues is a hurtful music. I would love to give off a kind of hope here, a sort of drunken optimism, but in this moment I’m tired enough to feel the full sadness of Violently Dancing Portraits, the melancholia buried down into each stanza. It’s a heartsickness as replete as the fact of celebration in those same poems.

—An Duplan