Equanimity

 
             

   
 
 

Friday, January 12, 2007

 
Very high ratio of signal to noise (3-1) in the poems in the Winter '07 Threepenny Review. No knockouts but a few are staying with me: Michael Fried's speculation that a painting of Degas's is a tribute to Manet, Dean Young staying closer to the topic than usual, Rosanna Warren's allegory of history and lyric, Dave Lucas's quiet prophecy that the second coming may well happen in a Midwestern city.

The current Green Mountains Review got me (but good) twice, and another four came close; nearly half the poems there are keepers. Heidi Lynn Staples put up some crazy good vocables:
My sun broke on the stone, my
you,
lily of the uterus, the
little lambent, yes's
lustrous cluster, little lambent
little sun, you...
Jennifer Perrine keeps her cool through subjects that would send most poets around the bend: an amputated finger, the ghost from a car crash in her front yard. Greg Hischak also does a ghost poem, a fun potted nature lyric that gets really good when it changes subjects to the Shakers and the outcome of their planned obsolescence. OK work by Dara Wier and Angie Estes, too.

Last spring's issue of Blackbird got it right nearly two times out of five. This one by Sarah Vap makes its horse-story strange without giving up legibility. Tim Burton's film about Ed Wood may have done most of the work to win me over to Ed Skoog's brief account of Bela Lugosi's best lines, but all the same.

Jordan - #

 

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I'm Jordan Davis.
I write a lot.
I mention it here.

Say hi: jordan [at] jordandavis [dot] com.

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