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"That One Was the Oddest One": Weirdness in Contemporary American Poetry

"That One Was the Oddest One": Weirdness in Contemporary American Poetry Jason Koo books "That One Was the Oddest One" Weirdness in Contemporary American Poetry Dorothea Lasky, Black Life, Wave Books, 2010, 77 pp., $14 (paper). Arda Collins, It Is Daylight, Yale University Press, 2009, 93 pp., $16 (paper). Jason Bredle, Smiles of the Unstoppable, Magic Helicopter Press, 2011, 55 pp., $11.95 (paper). Four poems into Dorothea Lasky's 2010 collection Black Life, the reader is confronted with a couple of seemingly brazenly confessional companion pieces that serve as fair warning that this book is going to be a little different. The first, "Mike, I Had an Affair," begins, "Mike, I had an affair / With Jakob Tushinea, the poet"; the second, "Jakob," on the facing page, is a love poem addressed to that poet. The effect of the two poems next to each other is startling: the admission of the affair is arresting enough, especially as the speaker does not apologize or lament her transgression but instead describes her feelings about Jakob to poor Mike--and then comes the love poem to Jakob to pile on top of Mike while he is still (presumably) down. Unless you are a shameless emotional voyeur, you cannot help but feel that you should http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Missouri Review University of Missouri

"That One Was the Oddest One": Weirdness in Contemporary American Poetry

Koo, Jason.
The Missouri Review , Volume 34 (4) – Jan 6, 2011
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Publisher
University of Missouri
Copyright
Copyright © The Curators of the University of Missouri.
ISSN
1548-9930
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Abstract

Jason Koo books "That One Was the Oddest One" Weirdness in Contemporary American Poetry Dorothea Lasky, Black Life, Wave Books, 2010, 77 pp., $14 (paper). Arda Collins, It Is Daylight, Yale University Press, 2009, 93 pp., $16 (paper). Jason Bredle, Smiles of the Unstoppable, Magic Helicopter Press, 2011, 55 pp., $11.95 (paper). Four poems into Dorothea Lasky's 2010 collection Black Life, the reader is confronted with a couple of seemingly brazenly confessional companion pieces that serve as fair warning that this book is going to be a little different. The first, "Mike, I Had an Affair," begins, "Mike, I had an affair / With Jakob Tushinea, the poet"; the second, "Jakob," on the facing page, is a love poem addressed to that poet. The effect of the two poems next to each other is startling: the admission of the affair is arresting enough, especially as the speaker does not apologize or lament her transgression but instead describes her feelings about Jakob to poor Mike--and then comes the love poem to Jakob to pile on top of Mike while he is still (presumably) down. Unless you are a shameless emotional voyeur, you cannot help but feel that you should

Journal

The Missouri Review – University of Missouri

Published: Jan 6, 2011

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