Description

<p> »So what if I left language by the pier. Metaphor’s a raft, » declares Andrew DuBois as he leads readers through a fractured past and present — from « slummy memories of streets » to a « a charnelhouse of possible clowns » — defamiliarizing, critiquing, and satirizing a wide range of conversational forms in the style of Wallace Stevens and Michael Palmer. </p><p>Yet, as « lives at time degenerate into victory competitions, » and the poet alternates between searching for an escape from the mundane and accepting that « merely being there together is a dull catastrophe, » we recognize that a formally wry, almost flippant, voice has become caught in language’s web. The surfaces of the poems begin to feel like thin ice, a brittle coating over which we skate for as long as it lasts. Danger lurks here: the poet must play the puppet, not the puppeteer and we must surrender, body and soul, into language as element.</p>