JONI WALLACE, author of Redshift, holds an MFA from the University of Montana. She teaches poetry in Arizona and Colorado.
The short, sparky poems in Wallace's first book really are
valentines: love poems, sex poems, poems of flirtation, pursuit,
infatuation and devotion, turning almost everything that they
depict into cause for an only slightly ironic enthusiasm, as in
Valentine with Girl Falling and Music: Gravity, our forecast, our/
lovely-engine-slightly-gunned, miss you, kiss you. Wallace pursues
a sharp brevity even as she promises, and tries to deliver, the
world: I'll trace for you flight patterns, another poem says, while
vapor trails circumvolve. Elsewhere she offers, instead, quick
invitations, some of them deliberately kid-like (Purple Plastic
Decoder Valentine) and some of them leavened with adult comedy:
Come into the sable night, / thing-witch with your strap/ of
knives, a blue-black bat/ shadowboxing your hand. Wallace's dense
and highly colored language, her interest in extreme emotion, and
her delightful aversion to straight-up storytelling, often recalls
Lucie Brock-Broido. Yet Wallace's collection counterbalances those
intensities with attempts at compression. Her characteristic works
are short (some will say too short) and they go by fast (some will
say too fast). Indeed, Wallace acknowledges as much--Phosphor, give
me more, one sequence begins--though that same sequence ends with
two one-line poems. At her best Wallace can truly make her small
units into self-contained delights--she is not just inventive, but
fun; such work should indeed, and in a flattering sense, leave
alert readers asking for more-- "Publisher's Weekly" (4/1/2011
12:00:00 AM)
Publisher's Weekly"
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