I didn’t particularly like this book after my first reading of it: it seemed somehow both too strange and too ordinary, with more humor and less beauty than I like the poetry I read to have, but I decided to give it another try. It’s a short book, and maybe part of my problem the first time around was that the subway is perhaps not the most conducive reading atmosphere for an unfamiliar book of poems: too many distractions. I did like it more the second time through, though there is still plenty of strangeness (“so paddle with vacuous cheer/into your fat bottle of pink soda and I will plunge/into some sunny buttocks with the grace of God’s eraser” – in “A Poem from Bled,” a slightly different version of which appears here) and ordinariness (a poem about drunkenly texting one’s friends on a bus ride, just to say you’re drunk). But there are also poems whose strangeness somehow entirely works, like “Wild Is the Wind”. And there are bits of beauty, like this, from the start of “On the 730th Day God Made Me Happy,” which I think is my favorite poem in the whole book:
I dreamt we fell in love.
You bought new sheets for the bed
and made dinner from breadcrumbs
and yellow squash. The red-fringed ivy bobbed
as the wind touched it,
stirring the building to feel. (27)
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