Violin Playing Herself in a Mirror

With rhetorical estrangements that recall John Ashbery, and rhythms and ambitions that recall Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman, the voice in these poems is nonetheless distinct, aware that its own time is finite -- "a minor catarrh / after which the throat clears and it's nighttime again" -- but striving with each movement for the sublime. The poems challenge our identities, our thoughts, and our quarrels with each other as they dart back and forth between interior spaces and real human relationships.

University of Massachusetts Press