These are cerebral, Language-style poems that often contain a cool, ethereal beauty: "Best tray of almonds resides more in heat than/ light. A capsule decoded fatherly. Symptoms/ of blue light cannot flare in sandalwood" ("Ode"). Some of the lexical choices have a quality of having been made randomly, and then carefully arranged into standard syntactical and discursive patterns. There is one sequence where texts alternate with bureaucratic documents arranged into "Poems"--these seem included either for their contrast to or similarity with Nelson's own text, and the ambiguity is most intriguing.--John M. Bennett
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #4,
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Copyright Burning Press 1994, 1995.