Out of his and her outsiders’ observations, a few words flicker The lungomare, tossing corkscrews of hair. With their went-thither hips in zucchini-green denim, they traipse In tight tee-shirts with foreign words like “Freedom” inscribed on them. (behind his girlfriend’s head, they pluck his mental tendons) of teenage ragazze Urethra of porcelain teapot hissesĪnd spies, looking even less likely than she is to be nice.
He’s had too much wine, guzzling a sunset of Sicilian orange, fool’s blood, Guess I’ll drop another aspirin moon, he thinks without thinking Look to this month’s Closer Poetry for a better idea of what lies in store in Plague Doctor. I can recommend Argos, Springless, Metafora, and Vacance as some of the book’s outstanding poems.
These notes are an interesting read in themselves for the erudition and labor they reveal on the author’s part. Furthermore, Massimilla has provided a bevy of helpful notes at the back of the book, which clear up much of the lexical and allusive density that cloud some of the poems. And the subject matter is intimate enough at times to cope with the book’s grandiloquent style. However, Massimilla builds enough intrigue with his language and layers of meaning to buoy the poems above this oversaturation. Apposition and turgid modification compound endlessly, resulting sometimes, unfortunately, in catachrestic metaphors. Make no mistake, the voice here is very academic. That said, the operative ego of this arranged world is aware of his doings and can’t help but analyze. Thematically, the book is concerned with the arrangement of the entropic, with taking the chaos of the world and “stylizing” it. Most of the time, these poems take place abroad, in Italy, where the speaker (or characters, as in this month’s Closer Poetry installment below) muses on his placements as a stranger in a strange land growing familiar or as a pulp of currency in a place where history and myth are palpable. Austin University Press Poetry Prize, The Plague Doctor in his Hull-Shaped Hat escorts the reader into a concourse of intimate moments. No, this is an extremely lush, Dionysian entry from poet Stephen Massimilla. You might guess from the title that this book isn’t short for words.
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