Customer Reviews

Wrong

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The sly wit and verbal dexterity of these poems show Laurie Blauner's gifts as a poet are only getting stronger and more invigorating with each book she writes. The opening poem in Wrong, "The Emperor's Wife," is an apt doorway into this book of poems which unabashedly describes and delineates the soft, vulnerable edges of our physical, emotional and mental lives. Lines such as, "Belief is everything. Yet I can't describe/ his new clothes, pornographic as the wind's touch,/the pale, abandoned ship of his body, empty,/empty as the suggestion of smiles and vows" evokes the fragile decisions that hold together our lives at times and our frequent inability to be who we truly want to be. A lot of these poems show the silences and lapses that can exist between couples, the true loneliness of coupledom. For example, in "Autobiography of Days," the speakers confesses, "I was building a life at all hours./ Lies and misdemeanors bent, strayed from/ my daily routine. My husband confided that/ he wished he knew me better." With such frank intimacies displayed alongside the stunning images found in poems such as "The Blind Girl," Blauner shows her mastery of a certain uneasy emotional terrain. As the blind girl states, "I assume I undress in the dark because there is/ too much air. The world is usually full of pushing/ and pulling, with doors that are tricky and/ vertical." I strongly suggest taking a deeper look into Blauner's rich, metaphorical world.

With two novels and five books of poetry under her belt, there's no denying that Laurie Blauner knows how to write. "Wrong" is yet another anthology of poetry, channeling her experiences in day to day life and analyzing the little things in life. "Wrong" is the work of a master of prose and verse, recommended reading. "All Talk": My apology is a ghostly accident.//Words slipping out remind me of a moon on an unlikely sea.//See what you want,/but what's heard is a wet confession.//I didn't do what you think I did.//Your body a pale, perforated landscape/that expects so little.//I did something different. I//slid past bad weather, collided,// trees with their sad rustling was one example.//I don't know what else to do.//Intention is a lonely leaf/that happens and happens.