Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"I don't want to know what I'm forging, I want to glide/ past obligations ampler than I've guessed..." Slack, odd and ravishing, Koestenbaum's poems take spectacular risksÄconstantly self-lacerating, curtly erotic and courting of clich: "father has big tanned tennisplaying nose/ I'd like him to be my shrink/ maybe strip him...." A pervasive flatness of tone matches the poet's laconic, self-proclaimed lack of sensation, one that is uncannily effective in conveying a desperate ennui, yet coyly manages to place itself within a particular pantheon: "Hollywood single bed in a letter by O'Hara/ decrescendo in a sonata by Beethoven/ blankness in a life by me." The 28 lyrics of the book's first section are perhaps Koestenbaum's best, complexly disclosing his relationships to family, lovers, books, music, life: "I miss how slow the world used to be,/ before I ruined it, this morning, with my crazy deliberations./ I miss the poisoned, old momentum of last night." Relentlessly name-droppyÄ"I like dropping their names/ it's as if I'm dropping their whole oeuvres"Äthe long poem "Four Lemon Drops" recalls the title poem of Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender in its unflinching, poetically reflexive self-examinations, coming this time in jagged, accretive quatrains. Wildly (Wilde-ly?) ambitious if less successful is a section of 115 sonnets, "Metamorphoses (Masked Ball)," where Medusa, for example, can speak as Mae West, Ronald Firbank or Walt Disney, and Echo as Rosa Luxemburg, George Platt Lynes or John AshberyÄand many others. A poet, cultural critic (Jackie Under My Skin; The Queen's Throat) and curator, Koestenbaum, in his third book of poems, presents scarily seductive surfaces, only partially concealing a concern with the very deepest questions. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From poet, academic (The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, 1993), cultural journalist (Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon, 1995), and all-around gadfly Koestenbaum comes this third collection, a book both sublime and contravening, musical and mildly repulsive. It's dominated by the 115-sonnet ``Metamorphoses (Masked Ball),'' which has all of the poet's mythic heroes and heroines'Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Taylor, Patty Hearst, and many others'speaking as Echo, Medusa, Proserpina, and other figures of Greek myth. While the series is brave and relentless in its ribaldry (Robin Hood as Echo says, ``I think my penis was larger than his''; Stevens as Echo says, ``I acquired new pine teeth. / My forte was a custardy willingness to chat''), Koestenbaum's autobiographical libidinal musings are far more remarkable. His poems have the appeal of frank gossip about strangers (``how difficult it must be to masturbate in a house occupied by smart mother and father'') and social self-mockery (``I wish off the bat I could list three hundred people who know me / or just three hundred people period'David Cassidy. Shirley Jones Bille''). The best lines have the logic of dreams (``I left my mother's body / to enter a duplex'') and (``I miss how slow the world used to be, / before I ruined it, this morning, / with my crazy deliberations''). Strange, milky delicacies indeed.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
