reviewed on April 29, 2026
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“Performative” my students called it when, to impart on them the sweep and majesty of the novel, and after a semester of invoking it almost weekly, with greater or lesser degrees of pretension, I dropped onto the desk the seven-volume, one-foot-high stack of In Search of Lost Time.
They were, of course, mistaken.
Likewise, to characterize the rendition of white, middle-class masculinity in Ciano’s debut as “performative”—“Sack taps in the shower. / Rat-tailed towels snapped back // across a stomach”—would be to dismiss with TikTok breeziness what is in fact a layered, psychologically complex portrait of the adolescent American male. The poem quoted above, for instance, “The Committee of Men (Locker Room),” rehearses a deeply felt ritualistic sociality that opens at the same time onto misogynist violence:
We whipped our dicks around.
Some packed lips. Some stood
for hours clouded in mist.
[…]
The jock mocked
naked in the shower. The banter.
The talk. The room locked.
The boombox. The song we sang
in unison was “Beat the Pussy Up.”
As Ciano treats the scene, male heterosexual aggression is redirected and perhaps sublimated as homosocial play. In another locker-room poem, “My Father’s Locker,” sports themselves stand in for what theologian Paul Tillich might call an “ultimate concern,” providing shape and purpose to lives that otherwise lack them. Here is the second half of that poem:
In full-bleed high resolution was a man in the moment
he is tackled at the knee so his knee disappears. The leg
no longer a leg, but bowed like a parenthesis,
the impact of the helmet as it shattered the limb past
the body’s understanding of pain, past the ecstatic,
the stadium light shimmering in the drops of sweat
on the man’s forehead, none of them falling but held
in place on the door of my father’s locker. No photos
of us. A Popeye cartoon from The Post, a mirror
for combing his hair, and this photo that he looked at
each day before washing his hands and walking the stairs
up to the empty gymnasium.
Consummate in close-up—on which, more below—Ciano tends to leave out of frame those economic and sociopolitical contexts that have sapped the sense of meaning for many American men, among them transformations in the idea and experience of labor, escalating economic inequality, and overweening liberalism; it is this nexus of grievances that has led young men, in particular, to search for that meaning not only in athletics but in the rebarbative right-wing ideology of Rogan, Tate, Trump, and others. The poems here rarely range far from the situational autobiography, nor do they depart tonally from the compassionate yet cool nostalgia with which Ciano evokes his speaker's childhood. Across that era, young men rehearse violence on one another while gingerly, practice-like, learning those forms of care with which they might subvert such violence. In this way, Ciano follows writers like Edgar Kunz, Jacob Sunderlin, Anders and Kai Carlson-Wee, and Michael and Matthew Dickman, down to the troping of the brother as coming-of-age crash-test dummy. “Three brothers,” he writes in “The Committee of Men (Brothers), “in the yard | the basement / broken barstool over a back.”
Often those inheritances serve Ciano well. Like Kunz and the Carlson-Wees—and like Emily Van Kley and the Devon Walker-Figueroa of Philomath—Ciano is a lavish gas-station realist, richly demotic in his observation that “[t]he bottles we carried in black bags / were all his. // Scratch-off lotto tickets // in the Stop N’ Shop lot […].” “I wish my email,” he writes later, “belonged less / on the Dick’s Sporting Goods / email list than it does.”
At other moments, The Committee of Men too closely recalls the preciosity of late Dickman, after the charm of All-American Poem had candied over into affectation. This is particularly conspicuous when Ciano treats his speaker's suicidal ideation, a form of violence turned inward as self-loathing; absent interior analysis or real psychological excavation, the gesture seems mannered, tokenized as “trauma” rather than enacted as emotional reckoning. “Nights I sat on the roof with its view of the bridge,” Ciano recalls peremptorily. “Nights I thought of jumping.” “A thought I keep having,” he writes, “is / how not to fail everyone I love, / and in thinking the thought / knowing that I already have.” One certainly believes such anxieties, and even understands them, but one is never quite ushered through the psychological drama that they must entail.
Closely related to mannerism, however, is technical precision, in the same way that Mannerism in the visual arts emerged from the mastery of three-dimensional space in the Italian Renaissance. Ciano, as suggested in the close-up quoted above, is an expert technician, the poems here carefully structured, their moves well-timed. In “For Years I Needed Several Teeth Pulled"—a smart “set-up and call-back"—an opening visit to the dentist swerves into a silent and particularly fraught car ride with the speaker’s father, before returning at the poem’s conclusion: “I couldn’t keep my tongue from thumbing / the hole where once a molar had been.” Often the poems move by means of figuration and association, as when a thunderstorm conjures “the horse we watched // together collapse mid-stride” or when a twenty-first-century Brooklyn man-bun is “so unlike anything / my Albanian childhood barbers could ever have done. / They yelled violently into the flip phone…”
Indeed, the most exciting and formally ambitious aspect of The Committee of Men may be its theorization of figuration. In a book that asks, as its jacket copy puts it, “what it means to break these generational cycles without severing connection,” the idea of likeness enacts at the level of form that tension between similarity and difference, inheritance and independence, so pivotal in Ciano’s thinking. If “dark” is the most frequent word in one of Ciano’s main influences—the James Wright of The Branch Will Not Break, where the word is used 29 times—“like” appears with similar regularity in The Committee of Men, a debut that draws on histories poetic and personal—on those stocked committees of the past—in order to create something no committee could.
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The prize committees for best debut, however, should probably pay attention.