Truitt (Anamorphosis Eisenhower) creates a series of landscapes in 69 fluid "sonnets" that owe something to the groovy techno-vibe of Japanese anime, William Gibson and the genome project. A book like Andrew Joron's Science Fiction
makes it unclear why SF and poetry have been such uneasy bedfellows, and this collection, not unlike Charles Borkhuis's Alpha Ruins, pierces the cosmic veil with New York–school-esque humor and downright irreverence, lifting this sequence above holistic atmospherics to wrestle with the knottier, ironic substance of life: "in the speckled distance a name is being born/ and then you are there on the 80th floor/ like richard dreyfus addressing viscerally the notion that this/ scrap of the keelson of creation bore it." Biblical language (the ark, the golden calf, Solomon) and a host of Eliotic symbols vie with apocalyptic turns ("during the second blast I was studying a potted plant learning stenography"), old-school surrealism ("the greatest poem is a woman's handbag") and, occasionally, with disarming observations: "how can we abandon time, which remains our only laboratory for loving things that die?" The often ambient, paratactic nature of these poems, frequently double-spaced and including little syllogistic or linear content, may leave some readers wanting more narrative structure. But when the top-down approach works, the experience is lively and vivid, bringing the reader to a cross-cut universe where "it is all one adventure.../ told to sit in the corner and enjoy the view." (May)
