YAKICH, MARK. Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting To Cross. Penguin. (National Poetry). Jun. 2004. c.75p. ISBN 0-14-200451-0. pap. $16. POETRY It may take a little doing to intercept Yakich's wavelength in this idiosyncratic debut collection (selected by James Galvin for the National Poetry Series), but the effort is rewarded. With its rolling, Ashberian non sequiturs and patina of postmodern opacity, borrowed forms (the list, the multiple choice test, the glossary), and frantic, surreal narratives, this effort may strike some readers as a blinking-neon attempt to impress, an MFA thesis gone haywire. But eventually Yakich's acute visual sense ("A turned-up parenthesis / hangs over her head / like an umbrella catching rain"), astute puns ("Sweethearts all look good / from a distance. But what makes them turn saccharine?"), and Rilkean lucidities ("What isn't / more beautiful / with a bit of blood on it?") assume the foreground. What at first turtles across as a jarringly jaunty earnestness reveals a deeper melancholy that, in spite of doomed relationships, thwarted love, and blocked expectations, nevertheless remains open to and enlivened by its surroundings, a "world shot through with collateral beauty." Given time to simmer and condense, Yakich's poetry promises offbeat surprises for many years to come. -- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., NY