I like Janet Kuypers' poems, even if she occasionally dwells on the emotional consequences of death and pan too much. Even so, for a poet under 30, her mastery of the simple word is exceptional. Too many poets, when they attempt a change of persona (especially in the first person voice), the result is often flat, unbelievable, too forced. Not so with Kuypers. In the poem "Private Lives III, the elevated train", she takes us for a ride with morning commute yuppies on a crowded train to work. Suddenly the poet's disgust for these middle-class workers surfaces; when she observes a woman decked out in a full-length fur coat, her reaction becomes the urge to spill coffee on the woman. "I'll bet they don't even know what the animals they killed for this looked like," she writes. Most of the other poems here are good, though Kuypers' emotionality can become intense, if not bewildering.--Kurt Nimmo
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #5,
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