I read "Maybe the saddest thing: poems" last night and really loved it. There's something about it that really resonated with me. Although I can't identify what it is exactly, I know it's what I felt was missing from Junot Diaz's recent book of short fiction. Diaz left me cold, although I could see what he was trying to do, with Wicker I have no idea what he was trying to do and it still really worked for me. I don't dislike Diaz, I guess I was just expecting more from the recent offering. Where Diaz felt like specifically stylized stories that interested me but didn't grab my heart, Wicker is like a rhythm, a thumping beat of a moving picture that shows me, shows people I know, shows being part of it and watching it all at once. I "got" Diaz, I just felt excluded, I guess, whereas I think Wicker speaks to some part of the same place but includes me.

I stumbled on this book by accident and didn't read any reviews or expect, well, anything really. I am regular reader of poetry but I find a lot of it just doesn't touch me in exactly the right way. Wickers plays with language and his place in the world and the language he uses. He paints pictures with words sometimes, other times he makes scene that seems like maybe a movie you caught half of that one time and have been trying to figure out the title of ever since so you can see the rest. ( )