From Publishers Weekly
With highly compressed reference to figures as various as Hatshepsut and Harry Truman, Caroline Knox's A Beaker: New and Selected Poems dazzles with encyclopedic smarts and rhetorical rhinestones, showcasing the dense, edgy wordplay that is Knox's forte. Whimsical verse-prose hybrids offset the narratives with quirky quatrains spoken (at one point) by dogs, or with fantastical dialogues between, say, an eminent American man of letters and the discoverer of the North Pole: "Admiral Peary: Welcome aboard, sir./ John Ashbery: Thank you, but I will not come aboard. I am quite happy here." Longtime fans will also appreciate the selections from Knox's three previous collections, two of which were published by the University of Georgia.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
The hyper-literate Knox invites readers to "walk on the topos of previous perishing / literary remarks about mortality and mutability." She uses "Nortony" as a pejorative and name-drops the Harvard rare-books library. She is often obscure, but her allusions are as much a sign of camaraderie as of scholarly pretension, her poems a pert crystallization impossible in more narrative poetry. "Our brains are made of marbles," she writes, "and a game / is always going on inside our skulls."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
