Customer Reviews

Jab (Phoenix Poets)

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First of all, I can't believe that no one has reviewed Mark Halliday's brilliant new book in this space before; the guy is fast becoming an essential American poet, with a body of work both high caliber and high volume. Jab may be an even better book than Tasker Street, which is a contemporary classic. Halliday is both astute, bitter, humane, and wildly original, alternately satirical and tender, capable of real lyricism- in the intensely personal family poems here- and dextrously clever in his deconstructive attacks on American pretentiousness of all kinds-- academic, classist, yuppie, postmodern, consumeristic. Here we see a poet related to Frank O Hara, but who has invented a voice (voices) entirely his own, in which he has gained a fluency and ease, a surprising improvisatory abandon to envy. All these punky little experimentalists should take a look at a pro, and read Halliday, who can slamdunk D.A Powell, Karen Volkman, and the whole Fence catalogue together. This poetry is modern, hip, all of that--but also a defense of the human, and of the humanizing wit....