Dyssemia Sleaze

Continuing her pop-charged, extroverted and libidinal poetic investigations, Canadian ex-pat Karasick (Memewars; The Empress Has No Closure; etc.) here offers her most visually compelling, over-the-top collection to date. A high-end production--one of the few paperbound books of poetry to boast full-color, glossy pages throughout--the book uses photographs, drawings, multiple typefaces, the ""open field"" spatial accoutrements of projective verse and other kitchen sink-isms to propel words across, under and on top of the page--and in one's face. The sequence ""Menaheh Yehuda"" invokes the 1997 bombing of a Jerusalem market and jars each syllable forward on the phonemic contours of the preceding--trashing, along the way, notions of lyrical morality by sexualizing the event's horror and troping Jewish cosmopolitanist stereotypes: ""Tropic/ blot clotters/ a cotillion of many cullers, isolata eros swigs in/ blunt pulses & skins the surface of/ her dimpled limits/ fermented in riggish gashings/ grasped in spronged frottage ruffled fetchings/ fraught with h ute conduits."" The book's centerpiece, ""Improbable Grammars V"" juxtaposes a barrage of quotes about and images of the Western Wall with deformations of Matisse, Haring, adlike depictions of women's bodies and didactic theoretical text. The clashing color images and attention-deficit typefaces (""dyssemia"" is a coinage for disrupted units of meaning) are eye-catching, but fail to develop a sustained critique of their seeming targets--sexism, capitalism, anti-Semitism, troubled Arab-Israeli relations--though the text-as-theory and the naked, juggled graphemes (the effect of which can't be reproduced here) conspire to create some intriguing hermeneutic whirlpools. The book as a whole is most successful as an exhibitionistic, youthful, pseudo-hysterical display of ambition and desire, and points the way to further poetic appropriations of images and politically explosive material. (Sept.)