The Mark of Flesh

William Matthews is impressed by the "urgent and conversational music" of Janet Sylvester's poems. "Modern Times" is a remarkable poem about identity construction, death, and lost love. These lines give a good sense of how Sylvester's writing moves: "The one organ of contact with existence / is love. It calls me backward to the next / morning's startled graveyard where we talked / between anthills and plastic flowers, / amid its tin crosses, our regardless bodies."