cover image Weasel in the Turkey Pen

Weasel in the Turkey Pen

Marie Harris. Hanging Loose Press, $10 (80pp) ISBN 978-0-914610-76-2

With her first collection in more than a decade, Harris ( Raw Honey ) presents prose poems that move easily and unexpectedly between the real and the surreal. A new piece of dental apparatus reminds a female patient of women being tortured in prisons, then driving home she's pulled over by a cop; a young man leaves obscene messages on an answering machine and in the next work ``Dali speaks into a receiver that contains the lobster's sweetest meat.'' As the pages turn ``she'' becomes ``I''; the poems begin to speak of real events that appear to have equally surreal effects. A woman returns to her husband after a trial separation, then says, ``When I turned down the bed sheet I found a red stain on the sheet.'' Harris works from an exaggeratedly feminine point of view: macho men watch sports on TV, hunt animals and sleep with their students, while women, who comically make coffee for the firemen, end up the real saviors. There is a sense of doomed journey throughout: the tourist in the book's second section searches for a place to feel comfortable, and in the final section, one finds winter, desolation and a dying father. (Mar.)