The Red Bird

In describing, in turn, a ""Toy House,"" ""Toy Bed"" ""Toy Enterprise,"" ""Toy Election,"" ""Toy Maternity,"" and nine separate accounts of ""The Voyage of the Beagle,"" one might think Joyelle McSweeney lacks high seriousness in The Red Bird, selected by Alan Grossman for Fence Books. While certainly playful and relentlessly up to date (check the ""Celebrity Cribs"" poem), McSweeney's is a satirist's sensibility, wickedly sending up, in ""Avian light,"" the identities and settings her speaker encounters, whether in books, ""a maritime chart of the Yensai Delta"" or ""Afterlives"": ""Forsythia opens its bright palm and the woman pushes her stroller out of it."" (July)