Neptune Park

“Milk is a popular soothing drink for children at bedtime./ More daring still are the birds.” Such off-balance non sequiturs are the bread and butter, or else (to quote another poem) the “seahorse” and “blossom-fret” of Tiffany’s bizarre, compact, and seriously entertaining third collection. Tiffany (Privado) has a reputation as a challenging academic critic, and some of his oddball cut-ups, with their implied air quotes and their intermittent shock value, seem designed at once to court, and to baffle, postmodern interpreters: “there’s the devil behind/ the glass making clothes for fishies,/ everybody watching.” These couplets and isolated phrases are at once friendlier, closer to lyric, and faster-paced than the fragmentary language of Tiffany’s earlier verse; such works as “Nothing But Halcyon and Be Remiss” and “Kids We Call Stars” suggest Rae Armantrout’s soul in the body of a Goth kid, or a hipster in severe distress, scrambling frequencies that normally carry chatter, attempting “to reach the legendary fruit first,/ a child frightened by everything and nothing,” and complaining that “ those free hits/ don’t help.” These pages are not for everyone—and they might seem all too au courant—but in the right hands, they will give pleasure indeed. (Nov.)