Publishers Weekly
Aug. 28, 2006

Girly Man

Charles Bernstein. Univ. of Chicago, $24 (160p) ISBN 0-226-04406-8

Cofounder of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, from which language poetry takes its name, as well as the online poetics list and the audio poetry archive PENNsound, Bernstein is also a prolific critic and a consummate poet, as he shows again in this collection of seven discrete chapbooklike works. After the invocational four-poem opening of "Let's Just Say," the book moves to "Some of These Daze," Bernstein's prose dispatches in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and on to the acerbic intimacies of "World on Fire," which critiques clichés like "what are we fighting for?" "In Parts" takes up the serial form Bernstein perfected in the classic Islets/ Irritations (1983) to examine the pieces of "a world in which there are no narratives in which to believe// simultaneous double negative// flop flip." A fascination with the sloganlike rhetoric of Tin Pan Alley runs through the collection, culminating in the title poem: "So be a girly man/ & sing this gurly song/ Sissies & proud/ That we would never lie our way to war." (Sept.)

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