cover image To Forget Venice

To Forget Venice

Peg Boyers. Univ. of Chicago, $18 trade paper (86p) ISBN 978-0-226-18126-4

Boyers invokes the atmospheric city of Venice, addressing both its dream-like ephemerality and its Shakespearean underbelly of duplicity, sexuality, and debris. "Cymbals and drums/ confirm it all," she writes in the opening poem, drawing from a memory in which loyalties are variable and display a sinister performativity. Boyers adapts the voices of famous Venetians to tell the story of her enchantment with this place: "Dearest Mama: Eel! I am to eat eel," Effie Gray Ruskin exclaims, "the heads of eel after eel, flinging// the wretched beasts, still/ twitching, into shopping bags/ of eager, festive customers." In "Wall Moss" Boyers appropriates an altogether different kind of speaker, offering this advice: "Grow resourceful./ Become like me completely Venetian:/ cling to debris, favor ruin." The emphasis on fragments and remains appears elsewhere in the collection, "the lives%E2%80%94the lies%E2%80%94we lived/ on both sides of the canal,// invisible the water's stench at low tide... a local specialty: filth/ disguised as ornament." Boyers debunks the idea of a scenic, postcard-worthy Venice in favor of a more complex attachment%E2%80%94one no less enchanting for its human influences, its "Silence, then the boatman's cry." (Nov.)