Sheehan's curious poems have a skittering energy as she conflates the past and the present, the comedic and the serious, the wild and the human. Her language is free roaming and pickpocketing, shape-shifting and punning as it chimes with Shakespearean resonance and Chaucerian sauciness, then shifts into hip-hop and cell-phone-age colloquialism. Sheehan's first collection,
Thaw (2001), pleased readers with its lively inventiveness, and her second is dazzling in its unexpected imagery and connections, its vital compassion. The seashore evokes musings on the human rampaging of the natural world as honeymooners recoil from a beach wantonly strewn with busted conch shells, the aftermath of slaughter, and lovers and families stroll pass Coney Island concessions. Sheehan takes a slant approach to saints' lives, the city as an ecosystem, and such endangered species as the ivory-billed woodpecker and young black men. Ancient Greek statues, a mother addled by age and a daughter refusing half-baked platitudes, shrinking gods, and the adamancy of love--all are freshly illuminated by Sheehan's oblique perspective.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Sheehan is a surrealist in the kitchen, a documentarian of dreams. --
Bob Holman
