WEE reviews April 25, 2006

Corsons Inlet by AR Ammons

Julie: I don't have anything against prose. Write it myself. I give a hearty thumbs up to prose poetry, generally, and have no issue with blurring lines between various art forms. But I dislike prose with linebreaks being sold as a poem. And this work by AR Ammons is prose with linebreaks and fancy pants indentations. It can't disguise the flat language and the lack of affect.

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Nerve Sequence by James Grinwis

Julie: Ever have someone tell you that if you didn't like a poem, you just didn't get it? Well, I thought this poem was okay, but the getting it? Not so much. Which means that my "okay" is a highly provisional one and that it's worth, well, nothing.

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Undid in the Land of Undone by Lee Upton

Julie: More prose, but this time at least the words weren't boring. There's cleverness here, perhaps the wrong kind, summed up by the final lines:

What I didn't do took
an eternity —
and it wasn't for lack of trying.

Yeah, that's cute.