Bay of Angels

This 24th collection from the legendary Wakoski shows the author's love of classic American cinema and French film providing the pop-cultural backdrop for Dionysian excess (food, wine, and gambling), a coming of age in Southern California, a poet's 1960s New York, and speculations on metaphysics later in life. Such a wide swath of thematic concerns would risk wavering in other hands, but Wakoski's table-talk verse, often compared to William Carlos Williams's, deftly handles this range, and her insights into contemporary life and art-making pierce through the screen in moments of stunning clarity: "Roman Polanski's "China Town,"/ a film where incest is used as a metaphor for beauty,/ where a desert converted by the Owens Valley water scandals/ turns into Hollywood, to LA, to art that multiplies itself%E2%80%A6// Nobody grows up in America. We all get murdered, though usually/ not as sensationally as Polanski's wife." Wakoski's notes, letters, and commentary are incorporated alongside the poems, especially in Wakoski's addresses to younger poet Matthew Dickman, bringing her themes of art and life into revelatory completion: "the boy who lives a story-book life%E2%80%94 he'd come/ down off the screen and/ was sitting next to me, like Jeff Daniels' character/ in "The Purple Rose of Cairo.../ and I was like Mia Farrow/ as the waitress in a diner/ ...going every afternoon to the theater, to wait/ for movies to invade her life." (Oct.)