cover image Given

Given

Arielle Greenberg. Wave Books, $12 (88pp) ISBN 978-0-9723487-1-3

Arielle Greenberg's debut Given promises, and delivers, up-to-date, intellectually challenging comic verse, a nose and a half ahead of most of her peers: her best work remains both slippery and sharp, like ice skates in use. Greenberg's most attractive, most clearly American pieces incorporate, and answer, the styles and signatures of poets like Dean Young and Mark Levine, telling the ""International Herald Tribune,"" for example, ""Your newspaper is a two-star hotel""; her aggressively contemporary figures evoke worlds her readers know well: ""All the soft serve flurry metaphors intended, right.""