Escape Velocity (Ragged Sky Poetry)

The first of these poems imagines their ideal reader as a lover, who purrs, "I'm going to run my fingers/along your lines.//Yes, I'm going to move my lips.//....I'm going to read you/like you've never been read before." The last poem sees the "intense play" of dolphins that are "harnessed weapons." Playfulness and intensity are the hallmarks of the poems in between. Serious fun: wit (sometimes caustic), wordplay, rhyme, even a sonnet or two, in the service of grief, anger, envy, passion, and finally joy. "Arlene Weiner leads me, without guile, without sentimentality, 'quick quick cold cold' into the past and back again. Clear-eyed as Elizabeth Bishop, who also has no use for 'melancholy wisdom,' Weiner conjures images effortlessly; there's hardly a ripple in the water. Yet the bay full of dolphins is murderous. Friends die, of course, or, worse, turn you out onto an ice floe with just 'a purse of dried codfish and an oar.' No matter! Rather than using memory to preserve, Weiner would order up preserves and tropical fruits. I want to keep my favorite of these beautifully alert, surprising poems with me as I grow old." -Joy Katz, author of Fabulae and Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems