Posts Tagged ‘3 stars’

Issue 1

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Edited by Gregory Laynor & Stephen McLaughlin
forgodot.com 2009
Reviewed by John Deming

3

We’re So Vain

issue1Last fall, contemporary poetry’s selfsame internet niches were abuzz over the publication of Issue 1, a web-based anthology that promised to be the largest anthology of poetry ever published on the web, or maybe just plain ever. It was to feature the work of thousands of poets, all of whom were listed at the editors’ Web site, forgodot.com. The only problem was, no one seemed to remember submitting poems to anything called Issue 1, and for that matter, no one had never heard of forgodot.com.

How did poets even find out about it? Googling their own names, most likely. My favorite blogosphere responses came from poets who were outraged that their brilliance was being shared without their knowledge or consent. Others took the news in stride, figuring they’d submitted to so many journals that they must have submitted at some point, and forgotten. But I think most people saw a massive contributors list published on a generally unspecific Web site and figured on something else: a hoax, possibly even a cry for attention.

To forget having submitted poetry is one thing; but to forget having written a poem? A quick glance at the hard-drive clogging pdf of Issue 1, and it was evident that the named poets hadn’t created the poems. But who…or what!…had?

It didn’t quite matter. Poets didn’t seem to like having their names attached to things they didn’t write, and Ron Silliman even went so far as to publish editor Stephen McLaughlin’s home phone number on his blog so that people could call and complain. McLaughlin later posted a note informing his public that “the phone number and address that Ron Silliman so kindly shared on his blog belong not to me but to my parents. I’d appreciate if you didn’t wake them up in the middle of the night.” He then offered his real phone number. He also offered an explanation: “I expected its size, format, and (to my eye) clearly algorithmically generated content to make our intentions clear.” The poems, then, were written not by people, but by a computer.

I can’t say for sure what those “intentions” were. But there are a few things to consider. If any ingenuity at all can be attributed to this hoax, it has to do with the way its creators could reasonably predict the vanity of contemporary poets; listing so many means spiking forgodot.com’s hit count alongside the editors’ notoriety. No one is ever going to read this anthology in its entirety – but it’s conceivable that many, if not all of the poems will be read at least once, by the poets who are alleged to have written them (excepting poems written by dead authors; the inclusion of “Chaucer” is actually rather funny). So maybe the goal was to get attention while capitalizing on other poets’ needs for attention. Cool. It has nothing to do with poetry, but cool.

The fact that these editors were the subject of such internet ire is also a pleasant reminder that the incestuous cult-of-blog in contemporary poetry is the cotton candy of our medium, and has very little to do with good writing. Are there poets out there who might Google their own names to bitch when they find unexpected things, wasting time that could’ve been spent charging their imaginations, making poems, shrinking from the oddness of linking and friending and…hoaxing? If so, they should be destroyed.

Most of the “poems” in Issue 1 look and feel the same. To give you a sense, I’ll do what Silliman did on his blog, reprint the poem that was attributed to me, myself: John Deming, American Poet. It is called “Turning knowledge from rest”:

Such rest bears no relation
to earth, boat,
contact, land
They will have no remorse
Outer will be they who will
believe the tiptoe of their desires
They may be
a meaning, coasts written with candour
From their magnificent
throat they will
yearn for someone, showing, from their
eye commingling waiting
There will be time
to meet knowledge
They will have to shave her
They will see their unmoved
candour, the sunken
flourish of it
Because they waited, a devotion
were sunken but not inadequate
The lightning offering her breast, her baffling
thigh
And what if
they should dishonour late
at night?

Dunno, what if? Sorry to waste your time. Didn’t write it, don’t like it. It’s dead weight, like his whole anthology (which weighs precisely zero pounds!). But I do like that my name somehow wound up next to Mary Jo Bang’s. I’m guessing – based on the presence of the “Prufrock” line “there will be time” – that the poems in this “anthology” are alogorithmically constructed from lines of other poems, but frankly, it’s not worth the milk to find out for sure.

If the “intention” was to show that any…computer…could auto-generate good poetry, then it’s a failure of intention; if it’s to show that computers can generate lousy, unimaginitive poems exactly like poems that lot of people write these days…that’s closer. Beyond that, the notion that meaninglessness carries meaning, the meaning of meaninglessness, is too bland to deal with on these terms. Are the poems in Issue 1 any good, or worth reading at all? Nope. But I’ll give them a three for the hoax. And for including me.

*

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Invitation to a Secret Feast

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

by Joumana Haddad
Tupelo Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

3

Not It

haddad cover

With hefty pinches of pleasure and sin, Lebanese poet Joumana Haddad begs her audience to notice the abundant sexuality in her newly translated selection, Invitation to a Secret Feast.  The selection is thickly overlaid with the standard ingredients of poeticized sex, and even those poems which purposefully skirt the subject cannot avoid a bodily subtext that arrives more or less at the foyer of an idealized but forbidden sexuality.  In his introduction, editor and partial-translator Khaled Mattawa touts that Haddad’s “ferocious and almost tactile femaleness [...] is grounded within a contradictory genderless desire to create space for creativity, original thought, and experiences,” and while this is a wonderful and valid criterion for any selection, its premise is inaccurate.  Haddad is ferocious (and often outright violent), but the paradoxical “genderless desire” that Mattawa cites does not exist. 

Haddad has a tendency to treat the body as a kind of weathervane, receiving interpretable information but necessarily leaving interpretation a bit to the wayside, and her dualistic approach is most often made possible through thinly-veiled encounters and painterly description.  Her speakers are women who have a sexual existence but keep its details under layers of breathy concealment.  Thus, a resulting separation from their men and each other becomes the primary way her speakers approach their own sexuality limiting Haddad’s poems to the realm of reaction: instead of stemming naturally from a woman’s bold, parthenogenic lust, her poems react to a perceived lustlessness in others and a desire to undermine that lustlessness.  She addresses this directly in one stanza of one of the best and longest poems in the selection, “Your Homeland is this Burning Night”:

 Lust sates your parched body
 like a desert drunk with the thirst of its sands.
 Your narrow land is wider than a lover’s chest.
 One drop of your nakedness
 and the moon falls apart.

Haddad makes her motives evident by the potential for destruction she grants “nakedness,” and her work cannot be read without its quiet but strong feminist implications.  She imposes lust on the experiences of her speakers, whose ownership of sex and their bodies is meant as a literal manifestation of the power their sexualized bodies hold.  In this fundamental way, her speakers parallel the women of Lysistrata, but where Lysistrata and her counterparts use their power toward a distinct political goal, Haddad’s speakers remain motiveless, merely acknowledging their power before fading back into passivity.  Take the first two stanzas of “Slow Down,” a poem that characteristically endows men with both sexual motivation and action:

 Slow down, impetuous man.
 Don’t rush,
 slowly mend your nets.
 
 Slow down,
 coming and going are the same.
 The water’s journey starts from below, rising.
 And my body—
 trust me—when the time comes
 will not escape your deluge.

Of course, Haddad is not always so passive.  The poems in the first section of the book, a selection from Haddad’s 2004 collection Lilith’s Return, are its most “ferocious,” and its most interesting.  In them, Haddad reaches beyond her cursorily political sex poems for something that escapes social reaction and moves closer toward poetic subtlety.  Each of the poems imagines the mythological Lilith in all her creative and destructive fury, and while speakers sprinkled throughout the book are awarded similar powers, none are as lushly celebratory and fully imagined as those in this first section. Take the disparity between her two approaches to nakedness.  Where nakedness destroys the moon in “Your Homeland is a Burning Night,” in “Lilith’s Return,” the title poem of the first section, Haddad writes, “I am the naked / who gives nudity the flower of its meaning,” conferring appropriate creativity to the female body and throwing in some wonder and mystery to boot. 

In some ways her earlier speakers’ acquiescence can be seen as a perfect antithesis to both active sexual pursuit and active sexual aversion in the same way indifference can oppose both love and hate.  But it is difficult to escape that the underlying obligation her speakers feel voids the positions of authority they are afforded as the poem’s speakers and as the apparent keepers of sex.  Many of Haddad’s women seem to have accepted the idea that they will be romantically and sexually pursued, and they believe their universal and unanimous approval is a way to pretend participation.  This implicit and embraced helplessness is presented most perceptibly in “I Am a Woman,” where Haddad attempts to undermine an acknowledged power structure with this strange reversal:

 I am a woman.
 They think they own my freedom.
 So, I let them,
 and I happen.

The lines stand together as one of the more provocative and fascinating moments in the book, but it often difficult to ignore that she sounds a bit like a child on a playground who, when tagged, proclaims they wanted to be “it” anyway.

*

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Factory of Tears

Friday, April 11th, 2008

by Valzhyna Mort
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Justin Taylor

3

Monkey Business

mort_coverIn late April 2005, Valzhyna Mort had the best week ever! She performed her poetry at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature, and it must have been a knockout show, because three years later it’s apparently the only thing anyone wants to say about her. I couldn’t help but notice that two of the three quotes gracing the back cover of Factory of Tears seem to have been written not about the book in my hand, but rather about her performance (performances?) at Cuirt. The top one tells of the “incantatory quality” her work shares with poets such as Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg, and is attributed to the festival itself. Program guide, perhaps? Below that, The Irish Times rhapsodizes over how Mort “dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her.” Finally, Franz Wright declares “Valzhyna Mort is electrifying!”

Minsk-born but English-speaking (she lives in the U.S.), Mort writes her first drafts in her native tongue as a political gesture. Franz Wright, along with his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, are credited—along with Mort herself—as the co-translators of this bilingual Belarusian/English collection, which makes it not just a little bit tacky to have Wright’s accolade on the back cover. I know, I know, you shouldn’t judge a book by its jacket, but that’s not to say you can’t.

From Wikipedia I learned that Wright translates German, mostly Rilke. Oehlkers Wright also mostly translates German, but she does some Turkish as well. Now, I’m not saying the Wrights don’t know any Belarusian, but I am saying that I did quite a bit of internet searching and found no evidence to suggest that they do. Other than their names inside of Mort’s book, that is. As it turned out, though, it doesn’t matter whether the Wrights know Belarusian or not because they didn’t actually translate Factory of Tears.

The one item of note I turned up was a short essay called “Translator Notes,” appended to the bottom of a Mort poem on poetrymagazine.org. (Factory of Tears contains no notes or prefatory matter of any kind). The notes, attributed solely to Franz, begin with the story of how Mort and the Wrights met. Turns out they were introduced at—wait for it—the Cuirt International Festival of Literature. To Wright “it was clear to me from the instant she began that…I’d seldom witnessed a performance of such charismatic authenticity and power. Anyone who has had the good fortune to hear Valzhyna will know what I mean.” We might as well take our one opportunity to give Franz Wright some due credit. I saw Mort read last year at the New York Public Library. Though occasionally her impassioned delivery seemed to descend into hectoring, she was on the whole a marvel.

Then in paragraph two (of two) we get some insight into the Wrights’ “method” of “translation.” Here’s Franz: “we are grateful to have had a small part in making her work available to readers. Her English is quite good and getting better, so our role was merely to assist in polishing the English versions of the poems she provided, and as a result there is really nothing to say in terms of the technical problems of translation.”

Is he kidding? Reader, would that it were so. The Wrights weren’t the translators of this book so much as the proof-readers, copy-editors at best. To give them credit—for them to take credit!—as translators is ludicrous; absurd if not obscene. But here’s the thing. The Wrights, even in their extremely limited capacity as “polishers,” have failed Mort utterly. Tenses shift, metaphors and similes lose track of themselves, syntax is regularly mangled, clichés abound. Take this passage from “Music of Locusts,” for example:

god tossed a heart like a coin
inside me
as if I were a pond
he made a wish
and lingered in the air
and everything belongs to me but hope

The “he” in “he made a wish / and lingered in the air” obviously refers to the “god” from a few lines back, but why is god lingering in the air? He flipped “a heart like a coin,” not his own body. Right? Doesn’t Mort mean that the heart that god tossed is what’s lingering in the air? Moreover, shouldn’t “inside” be “into?” The way it’s phrased now, one could argue that god is standing inside of the Mort-pond, presumably underwater, tossing his heart-coin up out of the water and into the air. Does that sound like the image she was going for?

Here is the complete text of the poem “Fall in Tampa”:

it’s our blood that’s dried up
and crumbles through our fingers
like faded leaves
but there is no fall in here
and summer is standing stock-still
like a heron in green water

Nevermind the non sequitur about “our blood”—whose it is or how it got out of “our” bodies (violence? menses? self-abuse?). To what does the word “here” (line four) refer? I assume she’s talking about the city of Tampa, or perhaps Florida in general, but unless she’s talking about being inside of a building (and if so, whence the heron in green water?) what is the word “in” doing there? The answer, of course, is that it’s doing nothing. It’s another mistake. Mort’s English may be “quite good and getting better,” but I think I’m being generous when I say it still has a ways to go. Well, that’s what a translator is for, right? Too bad Mort doesn’t have one—or, rather, doesn’t have two.

Another short poem, “On a Steamer”:

at night from far away
the city looks like
a huge overturned christmas tree
decorated for a holiday
then thrown away
now
it’s lying
with its branches scattered
and its lamps
still glittering
in the dark

Christmas lamps? That may or may not be the literal translation from the Belarusian, but in this country we string our trees with Christmas lights, and the fact that nobody told Mort as much is beyond negligence, it is a form of betrayal. Reading Factory of Tears, one is frequently left with the impression that Mort’s translators were trying to make her sound like Balky from Perfect Strangers.

Another Florida poem, “From Florida Beaches,” begins: “The sun is jumping among the clouds like a yellow monkey.” Then, a bit further down:

The beach pours like an overturned jar of honey
and waves lick the shore with their watery mouths.
In the water—boys—future mages
painting suns with the brushes between their legs.

Future mages? This stuff would get rejected from a middle school literary journal. And for the record, humans lick things with their tongues. (I don’t know about you, but when I do it with my whole mouth I call it something else). Finally, how are those boys “painting suns” while also “in the water?” Isn’t the fact that it leaves no trace the whole point of peeing in the ocean? (Yes.) Soon enough the poem serves up a description of birds as “paper money above the law” who “even put the wind in the doggy position.”

Look. Every aspect of the production of this book is atrocious, and considered asa book, it fails. But the poet herself deserves only a share of the blame for that; hardly the lion’s share. If Franz Wright showed up at your house and kept telling you that your half-baked, barely translated stream-of-consciousness poetry was ready for the big-time, you’d probably start to believe it too.

So what, if anything, can we glean from this book about Mort’s poetry, or at least its potential? Without question, her work fares better aloud than on the page, but the printed versions are hardly flat, or even uninteresting. It’s just that without the rhythms and intonations of speech, and the intimacy of live delivery, an irreplaceable source of their energy is lost. What might through a microphone and speakers sound like delirious intuition, on the page just seems childish and sloppy. This isn’t Mort’s fault. It’s an inherent and irresolvable problem which accompanies all attempts to translate oral traditions into print media.

Also, for an American audience with limited (or no) working knowledge of Belarusian culture and/or history, there’s probably a substantial net loss of meaning. Mort’s hands-off approach to punctuation doesn’t necessarily help matters, but it has the singular advantage of elevating her stronger poems to powerful, hectoring rants that are vitriolic, unpredictable, and sometimes very funny. Take this great exchange from “maybe you too sometimes fantasize”:

your parents never came back
maybe they’re ashamed now
a boy from the neighborhood tells you they’re dead
he says look even the Beatles die
never mind your parents
besides who knew them except you
all their songs were written by other people

Of course, the joke would be funnier if someone had told Mort that the Beatles did write their own songs (one suspects it is the Monkees she was thinking of) but still.

Some of the best poems in the book are very short. Just a few lines long, they’re funny, sexy, playful and just melancholy enough to remind me of nothing so strongly as the better of Richard Brautigan. Most important, they know when to quit. Here is “the memory of you”:

the memory of you
is like a needle in hay
that cannot be found
but every time tumbling with another man
in that hayloft
I’m scared that it will sting me

I’m not sure why she chose “sting” in the last line, where the more familiar “prick” would have bought her an easy and relevant pun, but I say this is a good poem. Here’s another:

“Teacher”
if you are going to be my teacher
you will have to become a tiger
so that you can bite my head off
and i’d have to follow you everywhere
trying very hard to get my head back

When Mort’s intuitive, visceral, free-associative method is working, the results can be quite striking, but as a stream-of-consciousness poet she is hit-or-miss. (What stream-of-consciousness poet isn’t?) As a writer, she really only has two problems: first, that she can’t tell the difference between her hits and her misses; second, that nobody around her seems interested in helping her learn how to. If I may be so bold as to make a suggestion: the problems are directly related. The first thing Valzhyna Mort needs to do is distance herself from Wright Enterprises. The next thing she needs to do is everything else. For what it’s worth, I wish her the very best of luck.

*

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Thirst

Sunday, December 10th, 2006

by Mary Oliver
Beacon Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

3

Another Year, Another Mary Oliver Book

oliver cover

It would be easy to dismiss this as yet another cog on the massive machine that is Oliver, author of the current top-selling book of poetry in the U.S. (who clocks in elsewhere on the chart at numbers four, nine, ten, eleven, twenty-one, and thirty).  It would be simpler to just brush Thirst off as more dazzled ruminations about light, peonies, and the pleasures of waking early in the morning to watch some specific genus of snake do something mildly interesting.

But what separates this book is the anguish she exhibits over the death of her longtime partner, Molly Malone Cook, who graces yet again Oliver’s dedication page. Cook died in 2005 and Oliver spends a good chunk of Thirst addressing a higher power in a struggle to repress anger at this death. The trouble is, the elegiac poems mostly come across as wounded; they grind this anger with awfully forced resolutions.

Thirst also offers a more fiercely Christian Oliver, who turns to God in nearly every poem and relegates the wonderment she used to offer dogfish to the consecration of bread and wine:

They are something else now
from what they were
before this began.

So is Oliver. Perhaps the cynicism of the poem title “The Poet Reflects on Yet Another Spring” says it all; she seems a little affected here, and it results in some rather shrewd, reactionary didacticism: “Everything is His.”

There is some redemption, particularly in the title poem, which is also the last in the book.  Historically Oliver’s best work—particularly in the Pulitzer-winning American Primitive—was fixed in an inspired medium between suffering and transcendence, but her work in the last ten years or so has been too consistent a didactic celebration. In the finale, however, she seems reminded that death and suffering beget confusion, a loss of stasis, and that these proffer the most genuine urge to bow before beauty: “I am slowly learning.”

*

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Coming to Rest

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

by Kathryn Stripling Byer
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

3

Pumpkins for Absence

byer coverKathryn Stripling Byer’s poems in Coming to Rest are often indulgently sweet.  The plush language and potentially captivating narrative are dulled by excessive sentimentality. The title poem of the book comes early on in Part 1 and immediately reveals Byer’s inability to let a stanza or a poem come to its natural ending point.  The first section of this poem is engaging; the speaker tells the story of a mother whose child has died and obsessively she asks her remaining children to name their first daughter after their dead sibling.  This compulsion seems to be what initially drives the poem into the second section, but Byer doesn’t allow it to do its work.  Rather, she continues:

Another name for letting go.
Or holding on.
Another name for home.

These lines are redundant, over-explanatory, and worse, they are distracting from the provocative nature of the previous lines.

Byer continues the poem in this fashion, with overwritten lines like, “I’m trapped in a coma / of middle-aged dullness” that evoke frustration rather than sympathy.  She does manage to end the fourth section nicely, though the fifth section seems extraneous.  The speaker has been visited by the dead child from the beginning of the poem whom we find out would have been her aunt.  The speaker is glad for the meeting and refers to the aunt as “this dust I’ve stirred from/ sleep.  This shell of light.”

Still, Byer is able to draw us in here and there in the first few sections. Coming to Rest is dedicated to her daughter, a fitting and obvious choice after the fourth consecutive poem that has to do with missing her.  This midsection of the book is overbearing and difficult to avoid skimming, but by the fourth “daughter” poem something unexpected happens, a sort of renewal.  Just when we’re sick of hearing about it Byer manages to draw us in one final time.  She describes her flight to Chicago to see her daughter and rather than focusing on the emotional reunion she observes the stratosphere from her window:

…lapis lazuli and white
shag carpet all the way there.
Nobody at home up here.

She momentarily gives in to her loneliness, the feeling that she has been left behind by her daughter and accepts it as not a wholly bad thing.

If there is one thing Kathryn Stripling Byer has down it’s creating a sincere sense of loneliness, not necessarily a pitiable loneliness, but often, a desirable one.  In “Stopping” the loneliness seems satisfying.  The speaker is coming back to an empty house, but somehow she is able to reconcile with the unoccupied space. “Nobody to welcome us home but the jiggety-jig / of these bugs in the glow of our headlights.”  What is slightly distracting is the use of “us” and “our” meaning that someone is in the car with her and therefore she is not alone, making it difficult to give in to the poem’s vital sense of solitude.

Byer is most successful when she is strange.  In “Halloween” the speaker has an imagined conversation with a pumpkin:

If I asked him, the pumpkin
would say he knows nothing of this. Let us pumpkins
be pumpkins, he’d say.

The talking pumpkin is the most interesting thing in this poem.  It’s funny; not particularly complex, but who cares.  The pumpkin just wants to be left the hell out of it.  Unfortunately it seems the pumpkin isn’t meant to be the center of the poem.  The focus is a young girl masquerading as a princess; she is less interesting.  It isn’t surprising to see a young girl pretending to be a princess from time to time, especially at Halloween.

On rare occasions, her sentimentality is successful.  The speaker in “Empty,” a mother, details what it is like to leave a daughter at college.  It is sad for the speaker, but it is also an opportunity.  We learn from the poem that the speaker’s own mother was overbearing and unable to let go of her children and that this is a chance for the speaker to do right where her mother might have failed.  By the end of the poem she has realized, “This is her city now,/ let her stand at the heart of it.”  She allows her daughter to own her new life, “Its welcoming emptiness.”

The final lines of the book are also some of the most gratifying.  Byer concludes by describing the souls of the world constantly leaving and returning as a “swish of an icy/ mare’s tail over the December sky.”

*

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Half Wild

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

by Mary Rose O’Reilley
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

3

A Load of Warm Souls

oreilly cover

The word “soul” is printed fifteen times in Mary Rose O’Reilley’s Walt Whitman Award winning book, which is probably too many for any single volume of poetry.  Predictably, her obsession with the soul signals a preoccupation with death, a well-worn path in poetry that much of O’Reilly’s book travels.

This preoccupation begins with the first poem “Twin,” probably the finest poem in the collection.  It explores the partial death of the self.  The speaker seems to have lost a twin either before or during birth, and says, “You were the part of me/ that gave itself to death.”  This death is haunting, especially with such gruesomely scientific words as “caul,” the portion of the amnion that covers the head of a fetus at birth.  The poem ends with a couplet, “Sometimes I waken/ with an infant’s shriek” and we suddenly find ourselves in a dark and cryptic world.

O’Reilley has many ways of measuring death in her poems.  Arguably the most effective is making visible the remnants of a life, as she does in “The Dead.”  Here she accuses the dead of having been too careful in life, as well as in the preparation for death:

their clocks never
run down,
their silverware
shines in its coats.

As often as her poems are based in the reality of life and death, O’Reilley sometimes enters a world of fantasy.  In “Bluebeard’s Wife” she doesn’t abandon the subject of death, but addresses it by retelling the story of Bluebeard, a serial killer that murdered each of his wives and stored their bodies in a forbidden room.  The speaker says of the newest wife, “she’s had so much practice/ not smelling the dead.”  These lines imply the wife’s forged reality and life of denial—a startling moment in the poem, somehow more so than when she writes, “the murdered women/ will stir.”

Some of the most successful and inviting poems in the book deal with the title theme, Half Wild.  The imaginative life of stones is presented in “Field Guide to North Shore Geology” which begins, “the stones are telling each other lies.”  We are let in on the secret lives of stones and O’Reilley’s relationship with them.  Another poem, “Scholar’s Garden,” details a scholar’s fondness for ravens and his preference for ravens over crows.  The speaker says of the scholar, “He once knew a raven who spoke Mandarin passably well.”

Despite the well executed dark tone, O’Reilley’s language often veers into the over-dramatic.  In “Sister Joanna Washes the Floor” she writes, “a deck worn soft/ at the margins of mystery.”  The “margins of mystery” don’t inform us about the deck of cards or anything else.  Other poems, like “Home Farm,” indulge in lines like “relentless desire” that are not only overwrought but set in italics to further emphasize the unnecessary.  These indulgences act as a disinvitation.

At her best, however, O’Reilley undoubtedly manages to recreate and call forth the wild impulse within us all.  Finally, our “skin puckers, thins,/ breaks into feathers” and we “belong to ourselves no longer.”

*

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