When I began reading this collection, I found myself sucked completely into the world of each poem--I found pleasure and surprise and admiration, and something to think about. And then I read the next few sections, which I found a bit flat...but that was okay, as I was still on a high from that first section, looking forward to what would come next. And then the next few sections were overly crude, and a bit boring, followed by one interesting poem...followed by sections full of poems weighted down by self-conscious name-dropping and diary-entry-sounding poems that read more like notations of ideas or emails than fully wrought and considered poems.

So, overall, the book was sincerely disappointing. By the end, I felt more like I was reading the author's correspondence, unfiltered, than a book of poems meant for a reader who doesn't know her personally, or care who she knows, so much as they would care about her work and what she had to say. It may be that I'll pick up the first book poems were excerpted from here, written in 1993, though I don't think that's the one already on my shelf. And/or, perhaps I'll read that one, or perhaps I won't.

As I said, by the end, this was more and more disappointing, I'm afraid. Not something I'd recommend, though I know I've enjoyed some of her works in the past, and I did enjoy some of those first few. They didn't make up for the whole of the book, though, simply enough. ( )