A Beaker: New and Selected Poems

With highly compressed reference to figures as various as Hatshepsut and Harry Truman, Caroline Knox's A Beaker: New and Selected Poems dazzles with encyclopedic smarts and rhetorical rhinestones, showcasing the dense, edgy wordplay that is Knox's forte. Whimsical verse-prose hybrids offset the narratives with quirky quatrains spoken (at one point) by dogs, or with fantastical dialogues between, say, an eminent American man of letters and the discoverer of the North Pole: ""Admiral Peary: Welcome aboard, sir./ John Ashbery: Thank you, but I will not come aboard. I am quite happy here."" Longtime fans will also appreciate the selections from Knox's three previous collections, two of which were published by the University of Georgia.