Customer Reviews

Zone : Zero (New Series)

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This was a gift for a relative, who raved about it. He was very happy with it.

What a lot of fabulous word/brain play Stephanie Strickland gives readers in her new Zone:Zero, especially in the long "Ballad of Sand ("silly con") and Harry Soot" ("Harry Soot in a seersucker suit") with its "scar arroyos, worry/furrows, wry sag"--Wow. This is the first of two poems ("slippingglimpse" also) that branches on the computer for varied and various readings. The book opens with "Constant Quiet," a seemingly-sprawled poem about control, and then "20/21 Vision" as centered to the eyes as its topic might suggest. "War Day" and "slippingglimpse" are two "boxed" poems, dazzling variations on the Anglo-Saxon double stanzas. If you're not conversant with contemporary techtalk or the Incompleteness Theorem, you might want to peruse the extensive and fascinating footnotes first as many poems celebrate the brain, artificial and otherwise: "A fact//is a failure of two things to be identical." (from " The Interior Castle"). The only time the personal is invoked is in the mention of a daughter in "Sierra Madre," illuminating the entire "Absinthe" series that comes before it. Strickland doesn't flinch from finger wagging at the greats: "they take suffering and make it/dangle" in "At Auden's Museum." Nor does she neglect the elegy: read "Prisoner in the Cave" and beat on your bars.