Made Flesh
Craig Arnold, . . Ausable, $14 (69pp) ISBN 978-1-931337-42-7
“Oh how the heart flares,” Arnold writes, “and melts like wax spilling over a candle's lip”: both the flares, and the excess, find the right voice in this wild second book. A few premises—Persephone and Hades, a “couple from hell” in their underworld; the poet tormented by failed romance in Spain; the same poet, later in life, rapt and overcome by erotic devotion—give Arnold all he needs to construct what might be the strangest and most instinctively powerful poetry book of the season, with sequences neither (quite) lyric nor narrative, but erotic and ever alert. Few who admired the clean forms of Arnold's Yale Younger Poets Award–winning debut,
Reviewed on: 06/16/2008
Genre: Pick of the Week