Notes on Ange Mlinko’s “Cottonmouth”
I was intrigued by Ange Mlinko’s newest published poem, “Cottonmouth” (Poetry Feb. 2016), a dense linguistic tour de force that weds the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with a locus in the contemporary American landscape, using stacks of cultural references like sampled sounds and playing them against an urban rap rhythm, then overlaying that with a verse form that invokes Virgil and Dante as it might have been imagined by James Joyce.
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