California

This deadpan and occasionally brilliant debut feels less like one book than like a sheaf of short projects, united by the poet's sensibility, her light touch, and her advanced tastes. The title poem follows, in many short bits of prose, the thoughts of a character%E2%80%94perhaps a stay-at-home mom%E2%80%94who wishes to change everything about herself: "My life in California will be inspiring. I'll send postcards to people who didn't know I was going...I'll buy a guitar once I arrive." If the effect here strongly resembles John Ashbery's famous poem "The Instruction Manual," Denrow's next project, a set of very short, flirtatious poems made wholly of short words, calls to mind instead James Schuyler: "Most of the time, waking./ All sky. Beside yourself,/ someone who resembles/ leaving." Denrow (a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Denver) concludes with a thoroughly strange, and thoroughly entertaining, third sequence, a set of evasive page-long personal letters between the famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. "Dear Edgar,/ The salesman is a place I go often," one page begins: the next opens, "Dear Charlie,/ I watch the birds at the window; they last/ so short a time." Very much a first collection, Denrow's book could prove important in retrospect: her whimsy, her way with white space, and her way of straddling lines between lyric poetry and avant-garde fiction could please not only fans of (for example) Ashbery, but also devotees of (say) Thalia Field. (Apr.)