Play Out the Match is one of the ballsiest debut collections in recent memory. Populated with barroom brawlers, strippers, dope-smokers, blue-collar workers, and bare-knuckle writers, these poems crackle with a masculine energy and a cocky swagger.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t all ring true. In isolation, poems like “Play Out the Match” and “Natasha” are powerful, jarring reminders of a broken and violent masculine world too little visited in poetry. When collected, however, such poems seem overly deliberate, even stagy. Make no mistake: Knox writes well and insightfully about men, with a clear vision and effective language. But the preponderance of these masculine poems in this collection seems like the self-conscious creation of a public image, a suspicion underscored by “The Chip,” in which the narrator sets up shop on a barstool and faces down the toughest customers in the place with only his poetry. The fact that the poem is a deliberate homage to Al Purdy further supports the point.

The more broadly emotional pieces form an effective counterpoint to this sense of calculation, and lend the collection a certain gravity. “Notes to a Father” is an insightful and moving prose poem that attempts to reckon with the roots of masculinity and the very male roles Knox’s other poems take for granted. (Although the poem is almost scuttled by an incautious use of the word “dappled.”) “Coffee with Marina” is a whimsical, affectionate piece about love and longing that turns on a conceit so outrageous it shouldn’t work, but does. “Mist” is effectively existential, but hampered by an ill-advised fog-as-cat metaphor that clangs on the ear and brings Carl Sandburg too sharply to mind for a work of such considerable darkness.

As a collection, Play Out the Match doesn’t entirely work. But there are some fine poems here, and considerable cause for optimism for Knox’s future work.