Poems from Bad Lilies, The London Magazine, Magma, etc. Yves Klein, Wittgenstein, Warhol and Tolstoy are mentioned in titles. There are poems after pieces by Muriel Spark, Kevin Young, Vance Packer, Khadija Saye, A Tribe Called Quest and Michael Craig-Martin.
I thought I'd have trouble with this, and I was right. Many of the poems are beyond me.
- "A man of theory on the Via Publica" includes "110. Who needs a doctor or a best friend/ when you can have a press officer?", which is the only worthwhile part of the 14 part, 1.5 page poem, but it's a sentence that could easily fit into a comic novel.
- On p.27 the lines are ended with a slash and a linebreak.
- In 'Grand Rapid Prodigal', the 3rd stanza ends with "baffle-" and the 4th stanza starts with "ment". I wondered about this and so I did some counting. The first 5 stanzas are 4-lined. I can't see a rhyme pattern. I counted beats and couldn't see a pattern. I counted syllables - 10/9/10/9, 12/9/9/10, 8/9/7/9, 8/7/8/9, 9/9/7/10 - and couldn't see a pattern. The lines (except for the last) are all nearly the same physical length - is that why "bafflement" is hyphenated? So that no line pokes out? But why bother with box shaped stanzas?
- I'm puzzled by "Don't ask/ 'Where is my handshake?', try instead// buying a white single-stem rose/ for the gauche puppy you think// you'll never love - but you might" (p.69)
- "Reverse ghazal daguerrotype" has 7 couplets all having the first line "But then - and you ... again"
- "Flashback jukebox" has 9 couplets, each having the last word "jukebox".
- "Homophonically" is light wordplay, not really worth a poem - "Bear in mind you/ are nearly always/ bare in my mind" is 3/8ths of it.
Other reviews
- in Conversation with Sarah Howe (the idea of transience [] felt like a keynote sounding through the collection ... across all your books, you’ve been interested in history, in a variety of ways. And that’s true of this book, no less. There are numerous poems here that evoke and invoke poets of the past.)
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