The Ice House

In this, his fourth full-length collection, Floyce Alexander ranges a gamut of experience, from the paradoxical 'Pariah' to the apparent leave-taking of the title poem. In between, the origins of a sensibility are found in the dreck of murder, rape, and racism, with infamy providing a way into seeing what at least one portion of an American legacy may amount to. Here he bids farewell to those who embodied joys and sorrows that in all their contradictory richness fulfilled the task the poet Rilke set in confronting "the horror of death" by leaving behind no "unlived lines in our bodies." Here too is work that attempts to respond to the perhaps impossible benchmark incised by the colonial American John Wise in 1772: "If a man any ways doubts, whether what he is going to do to another man be agreable to the law of nature, then let him suppose himself to be in that other mans room."