margaret_adams's review
I finished this collection wanting something more concrete, more experience and less abstraction, but also no longer convinced that such things existed. I'm not sure if that sense was a sign of dissatisfaction with what I'd just read, or a sign of the success of a collection that questions the verisimilitude of connection and conceives memory as a fictional construct. As reviewer Anne Doolittle wrote, "Koethe doesn’t believe in a common reality available to the artistic enterprise. One could argue that he doesn’t believe in a common language either. Both beliefs seem reasonable enough, but ultimately self-defeating for any poet." Self-defeat here is not synonymous with bad-art--on the contrary, I thought this was excellent--just really affecting.
...What
Is plain language anyway? Is it the one you think,
Or hear, or one that you imagine? Can it incorporate
The numinous as well as the particular, and the ways
Ideas move, and the aftertaste that conviction leaves
Once its strength has faded? I don’t believe it anymore,
But I can hear it sighing in the wind, and feel it in the
Movement of the leaves outside my window…
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