Monkey Bars

Whimsy alternates with bitterness, shock value with the shocks of recognition, in this fast-talking, sometimes profane second collection from Lippman (The New Year of Yellow). Poems about children, “crazy... college kids,” and family life start the collection off on a winningly comic note, but things go sour soon: “Mike Goldstein,/ who probably sold an ounce of dope to a thirteen-year-old named Brian,” joins a succession of playfully offensive caricatures (“I went down to the Jew Shop to buy me a Jew”) in speedy free verse that teeters between mocking itself and mocking everyone else. Asking “why there aren’t any giant KitKat bars left on the shelves” in “Wal-Mart Poem,” Lippman drenches himself in Americana almost to the point of self-loathing. Yet Lippman’s best moments join those satirical energies to an unlikely, deflated pathos, angry glee to worn-out autobiography: “I’m forty-four years old and can’t toast the seedless rye./ My kid cries because her hands are wet;/ My wife undresses in front of open windows./ What am I to do?” Lippman too often comes across as a heedless performer, eager for extreme effects. Yet at his best he is an everyman, a schlemiel, giddily upset at himself because his verbal gifts have few practical uses: thoughtful readers might first laugh, and then recoil, and then sympathize. (Oct.)