"Everyone turns" by Bob Cooper (Pindrop Press, 2017)

Poems from Interpreter's House, Other Poetry, The Rialto, Under the Radar, etc

Typically they're in medias res pieces dropping you into an anecdote or dialog. Once you've worked out what's going on, you go back to the title and it all makes sense.

I liked "All we know is what we see" and "The Lunchtimes of novel ideas". I liked the initial idea of many other poems, but felt that they weren't sufficiently developed. Other poems disappointed, for a variety of reasons -

• A lot happens, but it doesn't add up to enough - e.g. "Sitting with everything too wide for her wrists - gold-braid bangles,/ multi-dialed imitation Rolex with over-loose gold-plated strap - / beside her tattooed partner whose laugh Kalashnikovs the lights,/ she lowers her head, flinches as she bites already chewed nails" (p.26).
• Some of the most prosy ones (p.25, p.29) have the most fussy indentation.
• Some (p.31, p.32, p.36, most of the ones on p.40-51, p.62 etc) are too slight - they start too slowly and stop too early.
• The poems set in Prague did little for me - a phrase/observation is developed into something more than a draft, but no further. I preferred the poems that involves actors/actresses, though there are too many of them. In "Big Archie and the visually impaired" Schwarzenegger help a woman cross the road then talks into his Blackberry, "in conversation with someone none of us can see". That ends the poem.

A switch in style is "A Fear of Flying" which is all analogy - a flight where a passenger distracts themselves at take-off is "no different, perhaps, to your final one:/ a succession of details before a vastness/ you know is beyond your control"

The book has 13 blank pages at the end.