Verbal exploits mimic narrative ones in this nuclear-age version of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio.
Rosenfield's previous book, Good Morning—Midnight
, winner of Small Press Traffic's 2001 Poetry Book of the Year Award, offered a multi-faceted examination of feminism in a media-driven world. Here, she draws us deftly into the fairy-tale's primeval darkness to reveal the glow-in-the-dark fears and dangers of a world at war. The New York-based Rosenfield lived a number of years in Florence; the title is Italian for weave, conspiracy, and plot. A patchwork of voices, by turns philosophical, psychoanalytical, lyrical, and technical, urge, scold, and pester one another: "no guys, you are wrong and have to be sublimated,
" says one. Forest, village, marmalade, rich cream, and pieces of gold mingle with gasoline, Plexiglas, and bodegas—and with famine, welfare and unemployment. In the book's longer second section, the pseudo-narrative bursts its britches with chaos and violence. Characters named MOAB ("Mother of all bombs" in weapons parlance), Fatwah, Rambo, Dr. Nitrate, and Ms. Missile menace our hero, "Poor Little One," as makes his way through an apocalyptic History City, eventually to be tortured by the sinister Leader of the Camps ("On this night,
said the Leader, you will really learn to cry
"). These encounters make for a terrific careen through "the heart of the furor that produces such insurgence." (Dec.)
