Description
One poem in this collection was described by an au fait friend as “like Schuyler on mescaline.” Indeed, there’s a New York School observational wandering worldliness, haunted by visual arts, but this flaneury is baking in the lights of cable news and commercial small print.
As unreliable as the narrator considers narration, the reflexive urge to collage, allude, and pivot (evasive maneuvers) can’t shake a vulnerability tethered to real pathos from a lived life.
At its galloping heart, Birth Center in Corporate Woods is an overheard intimate conversation. Sure, there are TVs and jukeboxes and increasingly frantic bickering jibes in the background—and the tour guide cinematographer is in a fugue state, dragging the reader from emergency room to hotel room, then behind the wheel of a limping Ford, in a dive bar, cradling an infant, writing a dirty letter, never quite falling asleep—but they eventually deliver us to a way station where honest elegy and Guy Fieri can not only coexist but snuggle. The mutable “I” changes clothes between sets (and sentences), but they’re dragging the same load, leaving none of us alone, even when we’re alone.
