Lisa Jarnot

The fake [?] political poems and fake [?] pastoral poems that constitute this book seem to qualify as what Richard Kostelanetz would call "text-sound" pieces: works "where the sounds made by comprehensible words create their own coherence apart from denotative meanings." Most of these poems ultimately seem to "cohere" more as lovely clattering vocable contraptions than as sense-making devices, but this could be a ruse... Delightful.

There are poems where she is doing something she's done before and poems where she is doing something new. Of the poems where she's doing something she's done before, some of them I liked for their familiarity, and for the same reason I liked what she was doing before. Some of them I didn't like as much, thinking that it was a weaker version of what she was doing before, a possible parody. These two groupings are not mutually exclusive. Of the poems where she is doing something new, some of show more them were an extension of what she was doing before and made sense in this way and I immediately liked them. But some of them were so new that I had a hard time figuring out where she's coming from or how it relates to her older work. These I didn't like as much, but at the same time I admired their newness and wondered briefly if I'm not the one to blame. show less