Poems of the Black Object

Readers lucky enough to spend time with Wilson's uncommonly varied second book will find achingly self-conscious short prose essays, erotic verse about gay sexuality, demolition jobs directed at racial stereotypes, and plenty of genre-busting, metafictional, forward-looking hybrid forms. “The Black Object Gets Kinky at Home” shows “my human// figure excised/ in the chest// of drawers, hole/ in my head// as I rope,/ asphyx to zero”; “The Black Object's Elasticity,” a prose poem (or essay), finds “ways to evade abuse, some of which have to do with finding a replica of your abuser.” Admirers of D. A. Powell, or even of Dennis Cooper, should take note. Yet the book gets stranger still: with the sequence of prose poems and prose experiments in what Wilson calls a “Vergelioian” persona, giddy, disturbing jokes and textual games take center stage. Wilson zips back and forth between investigations of real rough sex (“What does man A hope to touch? B wants me. C is the owner of a big fat hand”) and postmodern investigations of images and empty signs, from dead porn stars to newsworthy disasters: “Your skin is pink,/ then opaque, caramelized then burned.” (Dec.)