Contradictions: Poems

In his first verse since the 1999 selection Stake, Alfred Corn presents a speaker as casually sophisticated as ever, and with more interest in other people's lives in Contradictions. ""My Last June in Chelsea"" is narrated by a skillful flaneur inspecting gay Manhattan's center as he prepares to move uptown, while ""New York Three Decades On"" recalls how he set down roots. ""Jerusalem,"" ""The Mousetrap"" and other poems superimpose a love for cities with Christian faith (""The temple abides in its myth/ but also in limestone fact""); shorter lyrics explore other languages (Persian, German) or art forms (Coltrane's jazz). The longest poems here, ""Tenebrae"" and the looser, fact-filled ""Seeing All the Vermeers,"" make life a travelogue, exploring an array of friendships, love affairs, and bodily conditions-from a retinal tear to ""men's hunger for sex.""