I came to this collection by seeing some of the poems online and feeling drawn in by these odd fierce pieces by someone I hadn't heard of before. I wrote a couple of my own in response as I tried to figure out the secrets behind what she was doing, picking the lock, not imitating the style. Sometimes this exercise gives me something interesting in the end, even if I don't figure everything out. When I saw the book on sale when I was on vacation I bought it to try to learn more about this person I didn't know very well.

Some of the poems are arranged in little groupings, some in a section of their own, and many of them have titles used to describe poetic forms of the past two centuries in English. The poem "Villanelle" isn't itself a villanelle, and "Ballad from the Soundhole of an Unstrung Guitar" isn't in ballad meter. The images veer widely from musings on the literature to raw personal accounts. The language avoids complex structures as she does things like talking about the weird rhymes and rhythms Gerard Manley Hopkins words without trying to imitate them in her own lines, but they often still reveal complexities of thought. She is not bothered if some of her diction might be viewed as crude, shocking. The clearest things to me is seeing how she's wrapped up with the subject of literature, and how her writing sounds like it has a clear intention, even if I don't always understand what it might be, even if she says she used to fake her ideas of poetry back in school. I think it might be easier to appreciate these poems with a guide, but it's not necessary, just keeping an open mind.

I'm going to give it a top rating, even though I don't think that makes much sense. There is plenty of substance in this little book, like the best books of poetry, and the poems make me feel that even if I can't capture their ideas or technique, by reading them I might be able to come up with my own.