Sesshu’s Baked Reviews

BORROWED LOVE POEMS by John Yau (2002 Penguin Books)

John Yau’s Borrowed Love Poems sway, stalk, excoriate, plop, filch, dog, comb, moil, doff. Rubber burnt to a grease patch on the roof edge. Someone’s Kronos Quartet CD on the front seat. Tony sensations produced continuous at the body’s whim, a gleam your parents once had in your own eye.

SIN PUERTAS VISIBLES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY BY MEXICAN WOMEN edited by Jen Hofer (2003 University of Pittsburgh)

Poet Jen Hofer’s translations of younger Mexicana poetas is ineluctably sly as clockwork. Afixes topographies. Swells across great distance. Shines teeth. Uncaps bottled beer inside a canned mind. Emollient effect on surface uncertainties, barks landmark. Open open.

THE LITTLE DOOR SLIDES BACK by Jeff Clark (2004 Farrar Straus Giroux)

THE LITTLE DOOR SLIDES BACK by Jeff Clark susurrates like mounds and clumps of ladybug beetles hanging on logs and draped in trees along Deer Creek (N. Calif.), flashing shyness, sensual motes. Thigh bones, femur, another eye, pineal. Pig valves work on a human heart, chewy.

BODY CLOCK by Eleni Sikelianos (2008 Coffee House Press)

Eleni Sikelianos’s BODY CLOCK braids the swale of sexes, twines prodigal swains, candles gutter in the niche. Corruscations fissure tissues. Any afternoon good for documentary. Smoothen linen. Moils in smoky light. Glad grief

A TOAST IN THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS by Akilah Oliver (2009 Coffee House Press)

A TOAST IN THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS by Akilah Oliver wafts a chant intermittent with crackling buds and shoots, gravel strewn in clay, transparencies of froth and water washing over. Maybe thistles and tumbleweeds around abandoned vehicles. Thigh high in thrumming of cicadas.

FEAR, SOME by Douglas Kearney (2006 Red Hen Press)

Douglas Kearney’s FEAR, SOME purposes, tossing the Roman with the canine, silvery viscous, pulverizing a filigree tree in night shadows, box. Canyon rivulets. Parted currents. You can go; I read with Douglas twice this spring in Los Angeles, wow!

NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM by Renee Gladman (2007 Kelsey Street Press)

Renee Gladman’s NEWCOMER CAN’T SWIM tocks ticks, transitions hale, swells looming across great distances where sea meets sky, I wonder why, utterably for real as squishy fruit, ever walk thru great hillsides of flowering mustard above Malibu?

PEEPING TOM TOM GIRL by Marisela Norte (2008 Sunbelt Publications)

PEEPING TOM TOM GIRL by Marisela Norte in misty neon, juice machine in Grand Central Market squirts garlic and celery, tangerine and beet, eyeballs click cartoon numerals on the 110 freeway, voice of leather and perfume, vinyl and myth. Tumult sward.

SKIRT FULL OF BLACK by Sun Yung Shin (2007 Coffee House Press)

Sun Yung Shin’s SKIRT FULL OF BLACK width of feckless blackness of fonts emit a personal radio, Midwestern signals, stickiness of edge and release, freedom and stillness, busting. Bleat of instruments. Brass vegetables smily teeth, my humming earth.

SHAPESHIFT by Sherwin Bitsui (2003 University of Arizona)

Sherwin Bitsui’s SHAPESHIFT congeals honeyed flies, mighty seconds tip, errant thunder in quake country (So. Cal. in its way), static rain onscreen, eddy and purl of languages talking, low, high, five. This highway dotted.