We Lack in Equipment & Control

Jennifer H. Fortin is the Walt Whitman of the month of February, the curator of apartment environments, the weatherman of goodbyes, a dewy-eyed automaton, the impresario controlling the hunger artist and the hunger artist herself, Bernadette Mayer's daughter watching out of an eye corner as her mother writes Midwinter Day, the miracle body rescued from three days in a snowdrift, still, alive, still alive. She gives us poems of scraps and details and lets us make something-big and vital-from her materials. When I read these poems I feel as if I am accumulating "not data but a song."

Darcie Dennigan