Opera: Poems 1981-2002

Barry Schwabsky. Meritage Press, $14 (104pp) ISBN 978-0-9709179-2-8

The change in season brings one of the largest and strongest debut crops in years. By the time these notes appear, all the firsts below will be available. Putting 20 years of work into one intensely wrought, luminously gripping book, Artforum critic Barry Schwabsky here stages his Opera: Poems 1981-2002. His approach to the eponymous form-colloquial, lived-in, forking the vulgar tongue, mixing in trailer park trash talk, throwing out references to Wittgenstein, Larbaud and Traherne-rises to the otherworldly.

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