Blinking Ephemeral Valentine

The short, sparky poems in Wallace's first book really are valentines: love poems, sex poems, poems of flirtation, pursuit, infatuation and devotion, turning almost everything that they depict into cause for an only slightly ironic enthusiasm, as in "Valentine with Girl Falling and Music": "Gravity, our forecast, our/ lovely-engine-slightly-gunned, miss you, kiss you." Wallace pursues a sharp brevity even as she promises, and tries to deliver, the world: "I'll trace for you flight patterns," another poem says, while "vapor trails circumvolve." Elsewhere she offers, instead, quick invitations, some of them deliberately kid-like ("Purple Plastic Decoder Valentine") and some of them leavened with adult comedy: "Come into the sable night,/ thing-witch with your strap/ of knives, a blue-black bat/ shadowboxing your hand." Wallace's dense and highly colored language, her interest in extreme emotion, and her delightful aversion to straight-up storytelling, often recalls Lucie Brock-Broido. Yet Wallace's collection counterbalances those intensities with attempts at compression. Her characteristic works are short (some will say too short) and they go by fast (some will say too fast). Indeed, Wallace acknowledges as much%E2%80%94"Phosphor, give me more," one sequence begins%E2%80%94though that same sequence ends with two one-line poems. At her best Wallace can truly make her small units into self-contained delights%E2%80%94she is not just inventive, but fun; such work should indeed, and in a flattering sense, leave alert readers asking for more. (Apr.)