cover image Matinees: Poems

Matinees: Poems

Ange Mlinko, Ange Mlino. Zoland Books, $13 (128pp) ISBN 978-1-58195-005-2

""Filling innocent pastry with rubies""--as in her masterfully askew poem ""Free Refill""--Mlinko is at the forefront of a wave of quirky, emotional gesturists currently turning New York City into an off-campus outpost of Brown University's MFA program. Guided by the clear-eyed, big-heartedness of Frank O'Hara and the sensual veracity of Bernadette Mayer, and yet referentially scaled for the ""compassionate conservative"" mid-to-late 1990s, Mlinko toasts twentysomething meta-urban intellectual sprawl with an ""apple-banana-coconut juice"" and takes us over a preponderance of overpasses and byways. These unabashed lyrics, with an almost aerobically-trained muscularity of phrase, are peppered with used-CD shops and bookstore visits of college town peregrination, while remaining free of ivy-covered preciousness or any easy condemnation of the banal: ""There's snow on every chainlink at the padlocked/ basketball court and cursive Walgreen's logo, and like the fan in your waterglass/ reduced from fancy restaurant ceiling it seems an illusion, these/ propellers on the wings. High wind delayed takeoff, lake effect hits as we land etc./ I don't think about death except in movie theaters."" Clearly sidestepping the insistence on formal, performative and typographical innovation of several generations of experimentalist forebears, Mlinko presents an ""I"" of amused and crafty befuddlement, and parades a host of ""types"" through its sincere and touching irresolution: ""a city girl who compartmentalizes her scrutiny"", ""clean-cut men and expensive girlfriends"" ""the shelves in vests"" ""one-man-band boyfriend"" ""Old ships-on-his-shirts"" localize her speaker in a world delicately between anthropology and people watching. In the more thematically constrained poems, Mlinko's wider power really shines. The deliberately O'Haran ""City Story,"" an account of her own poem ""Pop Song"" and its odd rise to popularity on the Boston music scene and ""Poem Bejeweled with Proper Nouns""--with a dramatis personae from Heloise to Liszt--demonstrate a conceptual reach that establishes Mlinko as one of the most exciting American poets under 40. (Apr.)