TRANSNATIONAL MUSCLE CARS

Surfacing from an improbable semantic gumbo that has absorbed Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism" and the class-crossing ripostes of Oscar Wilde's theatric butlers, Derksen's lava-paced comedic discharge positions itself right in the mainstream of the saltier, sparring realms of political discourse, action and advertising: "I stand/ before you asking to be memorable/ for my memorabilia and/ symptomatic for my mottoes/ in these times when we are told/ that movement is what we all share/ it's just that some have more legroom." Spare, astute "socialist one-liners" accrue sentence by sentence in the seven longish works (with a coda of short poems) of this third collection, elaborating a complex field of micro- and macropolitical concerns. Somewhere in the space between Downtime (1991) and Dwell (1996), Derksen's work began exhibiting a note of frustration with the language of theory, and he has developed a lively and careful Brechtian poetry that turns the event of reading into a hootenanny in the village square. In poems like "Social Facts Are Vertical" and "But Could I Make a Living From It," globalism and nationalism, as well as sexuality, culture and class identity, are depicted as links in a chain of products and correspondences: "I want to see/ the real relations/ but you've got Nikes on and I like you/ so I have to try and understand." It's an idiom that has already been influential on other writers, such as Kevin Davies, Rodrigo Toscano and Tim Davis, who are creating bridges between radical constructivism and a vaudevillian social platform. But even for first-timers, this book is accessible in themes, comfortably paced and motored by an anti-heroic punk sensibility: "I'd like to inflate a bubble building as a mobile public sphere, but I'm a little breathless." (Sept.)