Ugh Ugh Ocean, Joanna Fuhrman’s second book, reminds us again and again that the most pressing philosophical questions arise not from logical quandaries or ethical hypotheses but from trying to establish how a human being should live. "What does it mean to be known?" one poem asks; elsewhere she writes, "It’s just so much harder than I thought, // being a person." More formally and stylistically experimental than her first book, Ugh Ugh Ocean’s poems range from Language-inspired semantic disruption to New York School chattiness to traditional forms, but the best are those that combine Fuhrman’s ambitious thought with a joy in language and image.
          When she writes about love and loneliness, Fuhrman’s philosophical inquiry becomes particularly compelling. These poems are grave, hopeful, and marked by a decorum reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop–an "I" whose restraint turns the personal into the human situation. "Interiors," written near the beginning of a romance, is set in a cartoonish landscape that edges perilously close to Finding Nemo before being grounded by a thoughtful question: "Even the lone seagull here is too kind to eat / the fish it suddenly realizes is in its own mouth. // Is it a violation of you for me to write like this, / as if I had access to your psyche’s life?" The poet’s conclusion seems to be that, violation or not, there’s no way to fall in love but by such projections:

I hope you visit.

Until then it comforts me to write
as if I know you well. To pretend this poem

is a sort of lyric submarine, powered by the swishing
of optimistic pink goldfish and babbling clams.

With a similar concern for the power of perception to shape what it perceives, the poet worries in another poem that "the woman / in your dream who threatens to write / your portrait but doesn’t think to look / at you is supposed to me."
          This type of practical philosophy is more harrowing in the longer poem "Essay on What I Am Most Afraid to Write About." The poem presents two different emblems of love, one that requires accepting the "un-bridgeable distance" between two lovers, a second that presents lovers as almost disgustingly intertwined; and it draws rough analogy to art and life. Is every self un-bridgeably distant, the poem seems to be asking, or does art in particular isolate the artist? This leads finally to a stunning negation: "If loneliness is just a work of art– // some poem or some song or a play– // I don’t really want it. Any of it. // It has taken me my whole life to be able to write this. // So flat it is barely a poem... // Too flat to be a fucking poem!" Saturated with the "pure feeling" that earlier we’ve been informed should be removed from art, this is an ouros-boros in words: clever, paradoxical, and definitely a poem.
          The voice in "Essay," like the voice in "Rhapsodic Milkshake" (which centers on an "ancient babysitter"), like the voice of all the best poems in Ugh Ugh Ocean, is an appealing combination of post-postmodernist play and earnest searching for un-relative truths. Equally earnest in intent, her more experimental poems are a mixed bag. Several political poems are great and all have excellent lines, but many rely on moralizing or familiar liberal tropes. "How Many More Minutes Until We Can Devour Our Breached Contract?"–a promising title–reaches a nadir in the staginess of the Seattle section’s short lines: "my / neighbors, / whom I never / knew, / rush / inside, / wash / the tear / gas / from / their eyes." More frustrating is "Near a Gregarious Passage #8," a collection of fragments that resist interpretation while failing to offer any compensatory pleasures: "heed to it and / in. minus sorrow. folded over. / bulging. faced from. toothy." Were we given more hints as to what game was being played, this could be an interesting puzzle, but it doesn’t stand on its own. Similarly private are the weakest parts of "Admonitions," a series addressed to various writers, though in this case the feeling is more that we’re missing the in-jokes than the rules.
          These brief moments aside, Ugh Ugh Ocean is a remarkable book, even more challenging and funny than Fuhrman’s first. "Five Prayers for Business" highlights Fuhrman’s talent in grounding abstraction in the practical and her playful directness, and it demonstrates the tonal control that other political poems missed. Flawed or not, this world is the only world we live in, the poem says, with a delightfully understated last line:

O.K. So you found the insignificance of business
disappointing. You worry that we’re just words

projected on the living: two mice in a cavern,
casting elongated shadows on an idea.

Would you rather be dead? Would you rather
dye your hair the color of cinders?

Jeez.