The acknowledgements in Mark Cochrane’s new book contain the news that “Change Room is a work of fiction.” It’s an uncluttered statement but it has a caveat crackle, as if the reader is being cautioned not to think of the book as, say, “a collection of poems.” Which it is. But pointedly graft on the skin of fiction and Change Room becomes harder to label.

Which is maybe the point, because these poems, or should one say fictions, will not delight those who are heavily invested in a fixed point of view: the clearly straight, the proudly gay, the hard-nosed skeptic, the romantic mystic. Cochrane, as the title of his book suggests, gravitates to the protean, the malleable, to everything ambiguous. He loves women. He loves men. He really loves Pavel Buré. Or maybe he doesn’t. Change Room is a work of fiction. And don’t you forget it.

Cochrane dazzles, and that’s for sure. His is a big talent. He has enormous energy and range. Pathology, mythology, family rites, the weirdly homoerotic ambience of the hockey rink, and the sweaty ironies of the gymnasium are some of the fuels that drive his poetics. His writing is muscular, his optic daring and original. But while I liked this book very much, and found much of it breathtaking, I also found it needlessly abstruse, and academically clannish – theory-reliant, with a few too many references to other Canadian poets who can also say “Foucault” like they really mean it.

The pieces that worked best for me – if poetry’s “working” can be measured by how long and tellingly it resonates – were the poems rooted not in the fractured jargon of the MFA but in family narrative or nature. “Field Trip w/ Parent Duty,” “Writing, the Second Thrush,” “Mom (I),” and “Outage,” which is the last poem in a locker room sequence, are marvels of observation and evocation. At his best, and he is often there, Mark Cochrane is a glorious writer.