| From Publishers Weekly Continuing her pop-charged， extroverted and libidinal poetic investigations， Canadian ex-pat Karasick (Memewars; The Empress Has No Closure; etc.) here offers her most visually compelling， over-the-top collection to date. A high-end productionAone of the few paperbound books of poetry to boast full-color， glossy pages throughoutAthe book uses photographs， drawings， multiple typefaces， the "open field" spatial accoutrements of projective verse and other kitchen sink-isms to propel words across， under and on top of the pageAand in one's face. The sequence "Menaheh Yehuda" invokes the 1997 bombing of a Jerusalem market and jars each syllable forward on the phonemic contours of the precedingAtrashing， along the way， notions of lyrical morality by sexualizing the event's horror and troping Jewish cosmopolitanist stereotypes: "Tropic/ blot clotters/ a cotillion of many cullers， isolata eros swigs in/ blunt pulses & skins the surface of/ her dimpled limits/ fermented in riggish gashings/ grasped in spronged frottage ruffled fetchings/ fraught with h?ute conduits." The book's centerpiece， "Improbable Grammars V" juxtaposes a barrage of quotes about and images of the Western Wall with deformations of Matisse， Haring， adlike depictions of women's bodies and didactic theoretical text. The clashing color images and attention-deficit typefaces ("dyssemia" is a coinage for disrupted units of meaning) are eye-catching， but fail to develop a sustained critique of their seeming targetsAsexism， capitalism， anti-Semitism， troubled Arab-Israeli relationsAthough the text-as-theory and the naked， juggled graphemes (the effect of which can't be reproduced here) conspire to create some intriguing hermeneutic whirlpools. The book as a whole is most successful as an exhibitionistic， youthful， pseudo-hysterical display of ambition and desire， and points the way to further poetic appropriations of images and politically explosive material. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information， Inc. |
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