Lasky and Beer, ex-husbands and Uma Thurman

Two stellar new poetry collections, John Beer’s The Waste Land and Other Poems and Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life, are juxtaposed in a review by former BOTH editor Michael Brodeur at the Boston Globe.

Brodeur on Beer:

Until this direction arrives, the poems revel in their spirited collisions of past and present, high and pop culture, sincerity and irony. References to Eliot run alongside Pixies lyrics; Uma Thurman appears in a Lancôme ad in the middle of “The Perfumed Crypt or Four Quarters in Eight Bits”; a particularly soul-searching passage in the collection’s title poem is continually interrupted by an all-caps announcement: “THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT BORDERS./ WE WILL BE CLOSING IN FIFTEEN MINUTES.””

Brodeur on Black Life:

It takes a poet of toughness and dexterity to work profitably with the first person, but Lasky rises to the occasion with what often feels like an epic intimacy. As with the poems that comprised Awe, Lasky can often cause you to feel more like some sort of psychic eavesdropper than a reader, as in the opening lines of “Poem to My Ex-Husband”:

“Dear husband, I tried to write you an e-mail/ But I didn’t have the right address/ My husband, I love you so much/ Will you be mine forever/ I know you are married now/ Does that matter’’ . . .

Read more Beer at the Canarium website, more Lasky at the Wave, and more Brodeur here.