Combining pomo referential reach with spontaneity and non sequitur—"In any structure, you can obtain cable service"—Wheeler (Smokes
) spans time and place to get at the multiple interconnections of economy and the consuming self in this fourth collection. Small-scale linguistic transactions trade bits of Chaucerian complaint ("Purse be full again, or else I must die
") for current banality ("arc/ of trucks on the distant interstate, your what the fuck
/ and then her call"). Amid competing stimuli, weighty and lovely lines do stand out, and the book resolves into its final section of six, "The Debtor in the Convex Mirror." Beginning with a description of the 1514 painting The Moneylender and His Wife
, the poem moves in and out of scenes of Renaissance Antwerp (where the painting was done), contemporary Brooklyn, and a 1960s drugstore where teenage girls steal magazines. Similarities to John Ashbery's canonical, ekphrastic "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" are not accidental; though this poem does fall short of its great model, it does produce a unique, peculiar subjectivity that fugues around different kinds of debt—and guilt. (Apr.)
