Late Empire

This timely yet elemental collection from Olstein (Little Stranger) unfolds where the exigencies and distractions of daily life brush up against the political, the ethical, and the existential. The whistle, an ambivalent sound, repeatedly intercedes as a refrain in the prose poems of the collection’s core, where such phenomena as school concerts, global warming, conversations among friends, animals in captivity, kidnappings, car radios, Kurt Cobain, and Godzilla make their presence known. “This world, Whistle, there’s nothing for it, what can we possibly say?” The whistle, fills the space where language is unable to reconcile the individual and the daily with the grand, historic, and often catastrophic ways in which “we all tear apart and are torn.” The extended prose blocks constitute just one of several modes, each of which occupies a distinct section in the book. The single-stanza meditations that open and close the collection mix humor, exposition, and lyrical beauty; relatively traditional sonnets offer wordplay and imagination; a numbered sequence of poems in tercets take Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space as source text and offer an apt ars poetica: “By clear-eyed words can one/ hear oneself close? The rote/ of the sea, the roar of, the glint.” Olstein’s profound and attentive poems reveal her formal dexterity and knack for spotting modernity’s absurdities: “Some days even business as usual seems rare.” [em](Oct.) [/em]