From Publishers Weekly
McGrath once wrote energetically edgy, slightly difficult poems in long lines or in short prose blocks, slippery, slightly Whitmanesque catalogues of American problems, places, jobs, road trips and aggravations. He still writes them, but the edge seems diminished: the lushly topographical poems of this fourth book (most of them prose poems) have abandoned the self-skeptical oddities that made McGrath's debut, Capitalism, invigorating. Here, McGrath aims to depict an array of sites from middle America to the Latin American tropics; but the poems give the feel less of Port Olry or Miami or Tabernacle, N.J., than of a self-confident urge to describe. Part of the American Southwest is an "awful wasteland, desolate, sun-stricken, palpably grievous"; elsewhere grasshoppers' bodies are found "crushed and mangled, scaled and armatured, primordial, pharaonic." The Hoover Dam, on the other hand, is a "titanic concrete angel wing," and also "the many-chambered heart of a thing beyond our knowing." All the places the poet sees seem to stand for the human spirit, and it can thus be hard to tell them apart. The best (and most essayistic) of the book's prose blocks recall Annie Dillard in their expansive vividness. But most lack the intellective constraints, the internal questioners, that would block the road to sentimental excess. (June)
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From Kirkus Reviews
This fourth collection by the much-awarded (and this-round MacArthur grant recipient) Florida International University creative-writing professor continues the sense (from Spring Comes to Chicago and the other books) that McGrath fancies himself working a genre all his own: prose riffs that sometimes tell little stories but are not bound by the conventions of narrative. Except for some extra-long-line poems in the C.K.Williams vein, McGrath spares us the pretense of poetic lines; despite his imagistic language, his paragraphs seldom sound especially lyrical; nor do they flow on particularly poetic rhythms. Mostly, they seem like notebook jottings for a larger projecta memoir or a travelogue. Prose Poem, which is the closest thing here to an ars poetica, relies on an extended metaphor of formal fields and the varieties of farming types. And McGraths subsequent prose passages do little to clear matters up. Many of his pieces concern travel: Plums, a typical example, recalls a hill in Nebraska and ends with the Whitmanesque echo: I was there. I bore witness to that moment. McGrath considers moments like this far more significant than his readers will, who might simply be envious of his itinerary: he remembers a superb meal in Tunis, a festival in Brazil, a swim off a Gulf Coast island, a one-night stand in Amsterdam, his brothers wedding in Las Vegas, and a family trip to Naples. For all his hipster, on the road posing, McGrath goes soft when it comes to his sons, whom he quotes for cutesy effect. And his political commentary is best exhibited in the pretentiously titled Capitalist Poem #42, which lists all that his family buys at Costco, before declaring it the Grand Canyon of commodities. McGrath wants us to share his enthusiasm for the freedom and speed of the open road, but these sluggish prose pieces and poems barely reach 55. --
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