Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life

""he gets on/ he gets off he gets on/ he rolls it out/ he lifts it down the steps,"" begins ""Biker,"" the first poem of Stephen Berg's new collection, X=. Most often here, X equals a multi-clause sentence beginning with the third-person masculine singular and recounting loss, grief, aging, and desire from the perspective of a 67-year-old white man living in a suburban area-a perspective the speaker is trying to transcend, perhaps, in ""Death"": ""he practiced for the day when it would happen by erasing himself by never using the word I by pounding his face with an imaginary hammer ears eyes nose mouth eradicated so he'd be ready."" In ""Phonefun"" the narrator follows ""I could slash my wrists in homage to Rwandan suffering"" with ""I'd rather get my cock sucked on the phone by an old girlfriend,"" alluding to difficulty understanding his aging, his fear of women, and the world's changing economic, racial, and sexual politics. Berg, longtime editor of the American Poetry Review, dramatizes the speaker's awareness of this difficulty with Zen-like detachment and provides no easy solutions.