Loose Parlance: Poems

Grief, disruption, anger: these themes emerge in tightly crafted poems that evoke empathic images through precise diction and roughened rhythms. Taut stanzas and calculated rambles offer the hard pleasures one wants from poems whose speaking 'voice' contemplates social violence, conflicts between cultures. Poems about death and love are simultaneously embroiled in struggles with race, colonialism, Jewish identity and patriarchy. Impersonations of Moses caught in a cleft, or of the nude in a Manet painting, give historical density to individual utterance. Whether about later-life sex and marriage, or family dramas recalled to be reworked, these poems have an edge, a tough energy that comes from the drive to find an intelligible self-knowing--even as they also seek, more elusively, justice and healing in times of war and torture.