Customer Reviews

We Don't Know We Don't Know: Poems

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I saw one of the poems from this book excerpted somewhere--The Writer's Almanac? Poem-a-Day? Poetry Daily?--and ordered the book on the quality of the writing. I had no idea I would get something so extraordinarily good. Here the poet take an array of excerpts from public statements by Donald Rumsfeld in high "the world is chaos and I'm the only one who knows why, you stupid bastards, so I get to do whatever I want" mode and counterbalances them with quotations from Pliny the Elder from a superb 17th English translation. From them, he writes these dazzling poems in modern poet mode: yes, the world is chaos, it doesn't make sense, but we all know it and accept it as part of being human. It doesn't make us feel superior. It doesn't make us drunk on power. It doesn't make us run out and attempt to impose an imaginary order on it. It makes us human. Merely human. Drunk, if on anything, on awe. This is one of the top five books of poetry I've read in the last two years, right beside Seth Abramson's The Suburban Ecstasies.

A recent award winner and author of several other collections, "We Don't Know We Don't Know" is Nick Lantz's discussion of conscience, cognition, and how we perceive the world around us. "We Don't Know We Don't Know" is poetry that will make readers think about why they see the world the way they do. "Potemkin Village: Ars Poetica": Verisimiltude requires/a homeless man's feet/protruding from a dark/vestibule. Empty huts/will fool no one. If/I say do not look there,/you will look more closely, so I say, look,/for God's sake look./The men and women:/papier-mache flesh,/one bare bulb burning/in each ribcage. From this distance, light can/resemble life. See/how they wave to you.