The Next Monsters

"I like words because they do anything right up front. I am a black cat with engorged nipples. My babies are bats with goat legs%E2%80%A6 For example," writes Doxsee (Objects for a Fog Death) in this third collection. She creates a densely surreal world, referencing classic tropes of the horror genre, among them "Cabin," "Mansion," "The Last Monsters," and "The Key to Moving Correctly Without Running into Obstacles" in her section titles. It is not the gore of monsters but rather a more intimate, subtle, and at times even playful form of the grotesque that appears in these prose poems: "If I were a smile I would get bitten into. It terrifies me that the world contains the sentence: No one here has to see me." Doxsee is as concerned with ecstasy as it is with violence. In "Cabin," a meditation that revolves obsessively around domestic details, transforming them as might a fear-stricken mind, she writes, "We are at the time of day when one half of the pond is black and one half of the pond is yellow and each third of me is moving slowly away from the other." Here horror becomes a springboard for wide-ranging lyric exploration. (Dec.)