The Milk of Inquiry (Paperback)

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From Publishers Weekly
"I don't want to know what I'm forging, I want to glide/ past obligations ampler than I've guessed..." Slack, odd and ravishing, Koestenbaum's poems take spectacular risksAconstantly self-lacerating, curtly erotic and courting of clich?: "father has big tanned tennisplaying nose/ I'd like him to be my shrink/ maybe strip him...." A pervasive flatness of tone matches the poet's laconic, self-proclaimed lack of sensation, one that is uncannily effective in conveying a desperate ennui, yet coyly manages to place itself within a particular pantheon: "Hollywood single bed in a letter by O'Hara/ decrescendo in a sonata by Beethoven/ blankness in a life by me." The 28 lyrics of the book's first section are perhaps Koestenbaum's best, complexly disclosing his relationships to family, lovers, books, music, life: "I miss how slow the world used to be,/ before I ruined it, this morning, with my crazy deliberations./ I miss the poisoned, old momentum of last night." Relentlessly name-droppyA"I like dropping their names/ it's as if I'm dropping their whole oeuvres"Athe long poem "Four Lemon Drops" recalls the title poem of Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender in its unflinching, poetically reflexive self-examinations, coming this time in jagged, accretive quatrains. Wildly (Wilde-ly?) ambitious if less successful is a section of 115 sonnets, "Metamorphoses (Masked Ball)," where Medusa, for example, can speak as Mae West, Ronald Firbank or Walt Disney, and Echo as Rosa Luxemburg, George Platt Lynes or John AshberyAand many others. A poet, cultural critic (Jackie Under My Skin; The Queen's Throat) and curator, Koestenbaum, in his third book of poems, presents scarily seductive surfaces, only partially concealing a concern with the very deepest questions.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
From poet, academic (The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, 1993), cultural journalist (Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon, 1995), and all-around gadfly Koestenbaum comes this third collection, a book both sublime and contravening, musical and mildly repulsive. It's dominated by the 115-sonnet ``Metamorphoses (Masked Ball),'' which has all of the poets mythic heroes and heroinesWallace Stevens, Elizabeth Taylor, Patty Hearst, and many othersspeaking as Echo, Medusa, Proserpina, and other figures of Greek myth. While the series is brave and relentless in its ribaldry (Robin Hood as Echo says, ``I think my penis was larger than his; Stevens as Echo says, ``I acquired new pine teeth. / My forte was a custardy willingness to chat''), Koestenbaums autobiographical libidinal musings are far more remarkable. His poems have the appeal of frank gossip about strangers (``how difficult it must be to masturbate in a house occupied by smart mother and father'') and social self-mockery (``I wish off the bat I could list three hundred people who know me / or just three hundred people periodDavid Cassidy. Shirley Jones Bille''). The best lines have the logic of dreams (``I left my mother's body / to enter a duplex'') and (``I miss how slow the world used to be, / before I ruined it, this morning, / with my crazy deliberations''). Strange, milky delicacies indeed. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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