cover image Flying Out with the Wounded

Flying Out with the Wounded

Anne Caston. New York University Press, $22 (96pp) ISBN 978-0-8147-1560-4

Many of the poems in Caston's first collection, winner of the 1996 New York University Prize for poetry, take place in the emergency room, the burn ward or the morgue as bodies are examined, opened or catalogued. Hers is the territory between the injured and the healed. ""I couldn't tell clearly where the wound ended/ and the body began,"" she writes in ""Anatomy."" And so it is with a surgeon's precision that Caston opens up a world of blood and stainless steel, of bodies and instruments, taking a reader on a tour of those working hours when most of us are asleep: the graveyard shift. Compassionate, but veering away from sentiment, she examines the horrors in this night world and offers up her own brand of intensive care. ""We move/ between the living and the dying,/ heavy footed, pocked with grief."" Other poems involve refugees, abused women, cancer victims, the siege of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Tex., and the poor. Occasionally, Caston settles merely for dressing up mundane ideas in poetic affect, but when she compresses an anecdote into verse, her poetry is as sharp and bright--and sometimes as revealing--as a scalpel. (May)