Traffic with Macbeth (Tupelo Masters)

Poetry. A buffeting sequence of dramatic monologues that provoke and disturb, Larissa Szporluk's TRAFFIC WITH MACBETH evokes a dark world linked to the black magic of Shakespeare's tortured Scottish assassin, usurper of kings. Baroque in their sweep of high style and low slang, melody and dissonance, these poems use shifting animate and inanimate speakers and surrealist leaps to convey human brutality, the vulnerability of women and children, madness, and the struggle to escape the limitations of this world. "Larissa Szporluk is no coward soul, and her poems have always taken dark, unflinching, daring risks, thematically and linguistically. The turf of TRAFFIC WITH MACBETH is part heartland noir, part merciless domestic surreality, part fabular theater.... This book does 'mouth honor' to the entire spectacle of 'come what may,' from the 'blood at war / within a self' to the 'ghost-waves' of whatever music we can make of even our most brutal hours" Lisa Russ Spaar.