Monkey Lightning (2010 Subscription Series)

Martha Zweig's fourth collection of poems is her strongest. With a voice and verbal texture like no other contemporary poet's, she transfigures the traditional English lyric with an audacity that's rugged and unruly but decidedly literary. Zweig's etymological wizardry recalls the intoxicating word-play of the rustics and faeries in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet in their dramatic candor, Zweig's new poems are also as bull's-eye direct as John Berryman's blues-drenched Dream Songs. From the howling, buzzing, frosty reaches of the north woods comes . . . Monkey Lightning! The best work yet by a virtuoso conjuror.