The uncanny obstinacy of Colin James’ poems in Resisting Probability lingers like an elusive aftertaste, a sense of raw, stunted assertion and material finality both incomplete and unchangeable. This is we feel how things are, as we settle into the Jamesian groove: whimsical, laconic, gnomic, with a strange resilience of their own no matter how gnarled in form. What feels most solid, though, may not be things themselves, or what is said, but the unsettling edge of silence around them, with a hint of something a little dangerous, but funny too. We learn to take it like it is: When these are moved / to the center of the room / things don’t improve.