Jab

With his fourth book of verse, the aptly titled Jab, the Ohio-based poet-critic Mark Halliday (Selfwolf) veers skillfully between autobiographical reminiscence and bleakly comic free-associations, offering late-baby-boomer slices of life along with up-to-date self-consciousness (somewhere between James Tate and Albert Goldbarth). One moment he promises ""a poem so rich it made normal living look like sawdust""; the next he's ""telling stories about our absent-minded teachers/ who forgot damn near everything except what they really loved.""