I finished Sexton’s Sleuth in two sittings. It’s a fast read because it works so biographically: you get a vivid sense of the character growing up in the book, and the poems tend to fall on the narrative side of things. Brains like narrative—at least, capitalist brains do. Everything’s so neat and orderly, sensical.

But ultimately, I think I was disappointed in Sleuth—it left me wanting more and less: more imagery, less epiphany. Contrast this with my other recent readings: Tony Tost’s Invisible Bride, which toys with narrative like a big, hugely-pawed and clawed tiger cub; and snippets of both Saskya’s The Portch is a Journey Different than the House and Zapruder’s American Linden

The Saskya book is so concerned with the thingness of language, its meaningfulness and simultaneous meaninglessness, and it plays with this by both commenting on it and demonstrating these traits. It’s a tough book, but a wonderful book (so far). It too toys with the autobiographical and the pedantic (like the more instructive passages of Invisible Bride), but fractures narrative.

Zapruder’s book is interesting and lyrically very beautiful (so far). But I can’t shake the feeling that he’s doing something on purpose, like I’ve just walked into the room and he does a cartwheel, just because he can, and because he knows I’ll notice. I’m waiting to conclude my thoughts on this until I’ve finished the whole book. One thing I love is the sound of his poems–I’ve read most of them out load as I’ve gone through the book. The sounds make sense to me–sometimes they signify more than the words do on the page. And that’s interesting to me.