Compulsive Words

Reading the poems in Compulsive Words is like taking a hard drug. -Aaron Kiely Michael Ruby's new book is experienced as a kind of sotto voce diction, an unrelenting mumbling in the back of the mind, which takes two very different forms: as a graphic representation of voices (words presented in diagrammatic patterns), and as what might be "transcriptions" of those diagrams and patterns: "O paper placement machines/Blue ladder to family problems" or "Somnabulist prows to leaven/Healthy escarole..." Or perhaps the diagrams are transcriptions of the other texts: the tense dialectic between these two poles is one of the things that makes this book well worth contemplating. -John M. Bennett