Bullet Collection

The new book by Sandra Alcosser "Except by Nature arrived last week and I have been reading and rereading it ever since, turning it over in my hands, carrying it with me. How aesthetically lovely the book itself is, the paper ivory and thick. I love the dimensions of the book, how each poem has plenty of white space surrounding it. Prose pieces introduce the three sections of poems. Thus the book begins: "Dream and fester. The potential for evil and irrational growth. So the tropics with their perfume and juice threatened to consume...." And so we enter an erotic, strange, quivering world. My favorite poems just now are "Worms," "What Makes the Grizzlies Dance," "By the Nape," "Woodpecker," "Zulu Time," and "Greenhand." "Burying the Carnival" leaves me shaking on each rereading. Here are a few lines from "In the Jittering World": In a world jittering with possibility, / how did I come to this sour basement / in a Southern city to grade rhetoric, / water dripping all day down drainpipes, / and at night for recreation, / to nurse a lizard? I love his sticky toe pads, / the way he rests / between death and life, leaf-veined, reflective. / Carefully he picks across the blue carpet, as if / it were a globe laid flat." This is an astonishing book--of nature and eros, psyche and shadow, well titled from the last line of "Skiing by Moonlight": "Except by nature--as a woman, I will be ungovernable."