Broken Cage

In reviving the triolet form, Joseph P Wood pushes his investigative poetic techniques to brilliant if uncomfortable places. These are visceral works—daring, luminous—that in the act of recycling words and phrases discover in each new musical construct divergent realities operating a hair’s breadth from each other, and often in contention. This is a book that finds no difficulty in praising what undoes us, nor shies from sacrificing decorum for distinction—we even find salvation in the body-hopping spirit of a dead man. Here is a voice laid bare, and a poet at the height of his powers.