Blue Rose

In her first collection since 2011’s Twin Cities, former California Poet Laureate Muske-Dukes adopts a multi-perspectival approach to narrative, exploring mortality in a post-modern, increasingly global, and digitized cultural landscape. As a multigenre writer (she also publishes fiction and criticism), Muske-Dukes draws from an array of literary resources, bringing lyrical language to bear on narrative. “Did you think// they’d sculpt ‘Art’ out of the arsenal I lent them?” asks God in “Creation Myth.” The work’s hybridity and genre fluidity are its great attractions, resisting easy categorization as verse, essay, story, or collage. Yet Muske-Dukes’s narrative impulse too often has the effect of detracting from the poems’ mystery, as when the speaker of “Orphanage” concludes that “there was no home of course: I knew there never was one.” Meanwhile, the luminous imagery—the “Kewpie-pouts,” “iron gates,” and “clumsy spit curls”—accomplish the difficult work of illuminating the poem’s emotional topography. “I was used to the wind, those long billow-topped months,” her speaker explains, allowing sensory details to convey the work’s philosophical and emotional resonances. The poems are strongest in these moments, which exemplify a purposeful withholding of artistic intent. Muske-Dukes delivers genre hybridity in an unexpected way, but the pieces frequently succumb to the pitfalls of prose, telling readers plainly how each element of the story “aligns peacefully at last.” (Apr.)