cover image THE GIRL WITH BEES IN HER HAIR

THE GIRL WITH BEES IN HER HAIR

Eleanor Rand Wilner, . . Copper Canyon, $15 (93pp) ISBN 978-1-55659-203-4

Drawing heavily upon myth and ancient texts, Wilner finds the contemporary world has let the old gods down, and vice versa: "We drop Cassandra's mantle in the dust. / The king will not return. The king is dead." Here, Persephone is "a poem we read one time in school," and Aphrodite is a tired starlet with stretch marks. Many familiar figures pop up here, often in new configurations: Sappho has an exchange with Orpheus; later Orpheus meets up with Sir Walter Ralegh. The theme is consistent, however: "Now that the Muses have traded their togas for faded rags... their thoughts wandering into clouds of theory, inspiration's exhaust." Wilner's critique does not limit itself to the absence of myth; it often turns directly to the world as she sees it, a world that includes the Dionne quintuplets, ClearChannel and Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj Zizek. The language of these poems is plain, toneless, and often approaches prose; some poems eschew punctuation; most eschew the first person; many are written as one very long, clause-filled sentence, giving the impression of an elongated exhalation of breath: "Our larval period underground... allows us to survive, and makes / our faded days seems almost bright." This book seems intended to reveal the relative darkness in which such utterances are necessary. (May)