I was once told that reading a good poem is like walking down a dark alley — and that the poet is a crook crouching at the end, waiting with a blackjack. Three collections of poetry by three notable Rhode Island poets, two of whom teach at Brown, the other (Gizzi) at Roger Williams University, seem reason enough, in this age of deflated verse, to don helmets and once again brave the streets.

Julio Ortega’s The Art of Reading: Stories and Poems (Wings Press, 122 pages, $16), while split in two, is curiously coherent. The first section is comprised of stories that blur the line between prose and prose poetry, and the second is strictly verse. They are not separated so much as bifurcated — both explore the inefficiency of using words to convey meaning. The collection hums with the constant implication that language is a chase after substance, an effort to order intuition into a pattern receivable by the reader.

But if language is imperfect, Ortega’s attempt to transcend its limits is impressive. In The Art of Reading, the speaker writes “a poem of condolence,” but is unhappy with its stilted artfulness: “The tragedy is not stated; the world says it better.” In rewriting, he comes to realize the same thing we realize in reading: “Of this world we keep the music of words.”

Michael Gizzi’s New Depths of Deadpan (Burning Deck, 67 pages, $14) advances Ortega’s notion of opaqueness. The book is a collection of madmen’s aphorisms, such as in “An Old-Fashioned”: “What made the tick choose anthropology? / Try this: repair a hubbub.” Or in “A Dreadful Claim”: “I have fled as a quail, to no avail. / I have fled as a squint that sorely hides.”

We are tempted to brush Gizzi’s language aside as mere verbal pastiche, the bricolage smatterings of signifiers lacking internal meaning. But Gizzi rewards our patience with poems like “About Face”: “It was written on high I’d have thoughts in my head but no words to express them.”

In Use Trouble (University of Illinois Press, 368 pages, $60), Michael S. Harper examines the problem introduced by Ortega and demonstrated by Gizzi. Harper’s book is quietly triumphant, a dark celebration of the power of words, imperfect as they are, to describe our memories. In “Caretaking Supreme,” he writes of his mother, “she left her body / long beforehand her whispers were shots / of adrenalin to your steady frame.” Such musical pulses seep from Harper’s verse as wordplay perfects his recollections.

In “Knowing We Might Still Return,” Ortega writes: “Such is the irony of those who still believe / in their strength, it is the fist / hammering on the silent door.” Gizzi urges us, regardless, to press our ears closer; and Harper’s poignant memory proves the project worth the effort.

While Ortega wrangles the ineffable into a corner, Gizzi paints its twisted portrait in brilliant strokes of obscurity, and Harper’s reflective glory bathes the dizzy scene in that solemn light available only on the other side of confusion. These collections form the plotline of a story fusing semantics and ontology. To travel through these works is, ultimately, to discover the meanings of “meaning”— linguistic and personal.

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