IN THE HAIRY ARMS OF WHITMAN

Kushner's sixth collection furthers his speaker's love-struck encounters with New York City, presenting fantastic vignettes and firecracker collage poems that read like some conflagration of fortune cookies, neon signage and plangent self-help brochures. Seventy-year-old Kushner takes the New York School aesthetic back to its rich gay roots; his Chelsea-based speaker comments on everything from sexy muscled passers-by, late night tricks and imaginary giraffes drinking blue oceans in a family room. But above all, Kushner is a master poet of loneliness, casting it in a cool, benevolent, magical light, evoking childhood (years when most sleep alone) and lunar spaces where the laws of the earth do not apply: "I am all for/ law & order, have you seen my room?/ They call it THE RAT PATROL who have/ seen my moon. I often wonder how/ many people at one time there are looking up/ to see me dreaming on the moon, waving away." Kushner, who has been known to write sonnets by walking 14 city blocks, one line per block, bestows grace on his readers like a whirling dervish with extended hand, "I was always waiting, right here in my darkness,/ & even with no one on this cold earth to wait for/ & still shall I wait here, even as I fast walk, ever/ upward & onward & into the fray." (June)

Forecast:Following on the success of their New York–based anthology Poetry After 9/11, this is one of the first books in Melville House's new New York Poets series, which "features the work of poets long admired in New York and beyond for their development of a distinctive idiom and a unique poetic identity." Kushner is a perfect choice.