Death, But at a Good Price

While his ideas are novel and his language witty, Semansky's poems are like visions created by an imagination with a short attention span. In ``A Story of Levitation,'' the speaker sees himself rising above the streets, higher and higher, hoping to reach ``some final space telling me / I had arrived.'' The metaphysical implications of this metaphor are vague, and the poem ends disappointingly, as the speaker falls back ``into the world in a slow hail of words, / preparing me for that fierce embrace.'' In ``The Girl Who Couldn't Stop It,'' a man takes his daughter to the hospital because she is unable to halt the obscenities spewing out of her mouth. While Semansky has a humorous way with such an absurd situation, the theme is overshadowed by the comic shock of the girl's vulgarity. The poet possesses an unerring sense of the hyperbolic aspects of everyday life. A city dweller in ``Somewhere'' is about to go out of his mind amid the overwhelming stimuli of Manhattan. A vendor offers a skewer of shish kebab as an antidote: ``eeets deelishus, and so very tendah!'' This is Semansky's first book of poetry. (Jan.)