"Irresistible," wrote Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott when he selected Kathleen Ossip's The Search Engine for the Honickman Prize from more than 1000 manuscripts. "You feel like quoting her," Walcott continued, "because she is . . . so fresh and so open." Ossip's poetry is word-rich and music-lush, infused with fastidious hilarity and a genuine intelligence. It is a poetry of nerves, with a hunger for subtlety. She admits her influences easily, using...