The details of a richly recalled life mingle with more abstract speculation about memory, gender and reading in these pleasantly associative, and occasionally striking, prose poems. Though they range in subjects from Hitler to the '50s icon of the title, from nail salons and optometrists to California, Judaism, opera, Gide and the nature of consciousness, Koestenbaum's one- and two-page works share a mode of construction: flat sentences about people, places and events mingle—sometimes charmingly, sometimes at random—with lyrical or lightly ironic abstractions. The poems seek a tone, and a cultural space, somewhere between Grace Paley's prose and Lyn Hejinian's influential My Life,
though they do not always equal those models. Koestenbaum (Criminal Sonnets) can sound unduly startled by her memories: "Patti LuPone played Maria Callas on Broadway: from nowhere comes Patti LuPone." Elsewhere she simply unrolls bits of autobiography: youthful fears of Hitler, grown-up meals in Cambridge, Mass., a cancer scare, grown sons and "the suburban neighborhood where I was a conventional mother and wife"—all remain of interest in themselves, but are rarely transformed by style. (One of her sons is the poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum.) At her best, as in "Rembrandt" or "Cassandra and Irene" (from which the collection takes its title), Koestenbaum's understated prose blocks explore neat hypotheses about life stories (her own and others'): "painters on townhouses... paint and pain and talk and talk. When they've moved on to their next job, what will distract me, what outside interference that becomes as much the main narrative as the main narrative." Main or not, these narratives will find their fans. (Oct.)
