LULLABY FOR ONE FIST
Andrea Werblin, . . Wesleyan, $26 (64pp) ISBN 978-0-8195-6463-4
Nine new mostly narrative-driven first books testify to an evolving idiom being engagingly taken up by younger women poets. Tough talk, earnest inquiry and wry deflation are just a few of the rhetorical modes thrown back at the culture at large.
NPR reporter Werblin's gimlet-eyed poems would seem acerbic if they were less vivid and sympathetic. The speaker knows that the bar-prowling "Lucite, deft, stick-and-move breathers" seek "the girl most unlikely to/ flag or disable, so that seconds/ after minking her one can leave/ disguised as a jug/ of purple flowers repeating/ ... for water." Hope, disaffection, humor and lyricism intermingle in fresh but recognizably Gen-X sensibilities: "My Chagall bra droops/ in front to say, look,/ Is it really all this intimate?/ ...I promise you the dreamy blurred goats/ are proof of faith; you can smash/ the sky above them and still come out lovely."
Reviewed on: 06/18/2001
Genre: Nonfiction
Library Binding - 64 pages - 978-0-8195-6462-7
