OGRESS OBLIGE

"An ahistorical avant-garde verges on apoplexy at the approach of an active mother—RRRRRR—" Juxtaposing high Latinate lexemes, frequent internal rhymes and self-consciously stilted neologisms ("enchildment"; "molluskular discord"), Lusk evokes the history of England and its poesy (especially of the 18th century) as a colonial specter of our current post-co writhings: "Errant friction fall-out/ to repudiate a lineage/ of hammered patricians." Lusk's diction speaks elegantly of its silent presuppositions—and falls flat on its face: "Let's white English!/ Composing transits of ineffable/ Fluff into such argumentative states. Nobody thinks/ To shut you the fuck up." Subjected to a poltergeist bent on "aural thumpage," rarefied aesthetic language trips on itself, swerves thematically ("Beer Girl, Art Thou Troubled?"), swears and yields lexical and phrasal hybrids that poke violently through its surface, turning Poetry into a "puritan potty mouth." Dark humor flickers from intensely compacted abject scenarios: "Beholden to any Pothead that/ trots down the pike"; "Mam I shrieked there is not any problem"; "You write 'em, we pulp 'em." Such moments situate a subject, and her sidekick, Poetry, in the present—thus unequipped and lacking outlets from which to vent: "But 'tis a poor carpenter wot blames her tools." Frustration also percolates from the book's rapidly shifting form, where stanzas tend to move according to local phrasal logics. This shifting also enacts a kind of impatience, while remaining precise and intentional. Like fellow linguistic traveler Jean Day, Lusk, in this second full-length book, further turns a carefully wounded discursive preciosity into an amazingly powerful critical and aesthetic tool, as deeply rewarding as it is fun to read. (Aug.)

Forecast:Lusk is a member of Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing. Krupskaya, a San Francisco–based publishing collective, has recently gotten its books into Barnes & Noble, among other stores, and packages its four annual titles with a distinctive house look. Lusk's second collection should be a major title for the press, particularly if picked up for feminist theory syllabi.