Tag: contemporary poetry

by Steven M. Critelli November 29, 2012 2
Literary Criticism

Reading Michael Robbins – Alien vs. Predator

While he writes as a new age poète maudit, following the example of François Villon, Tristan Corbière, and Claude Baudelaire, one can hardly recall a more confrontational voice that challenges the sanctity of everything, especially poetry, which Robbins cannibalizes with evil delight. The fading glory of the natural world and the Keatsian ideal, “truth is beauty, beauty truth,” hold nothing for him, except as sullied palimpsest upon which to write his inspired graffiti. In the Bizarro world of the irrational, profligate and amoral that Robbins apprehends, “The truth makes me hurl; the truth is a mistake.”

by Steven M. Critelli June 26, 2012 1
Literary Criticism

The Casual Perfect by Lavinia Greenlaw

Science has also shown that our sense of being “in love” is the product of the hormonal activities of phenylethylamine, norepinephrine and dopamine. In The Casual Perfect, Ms. Greenlaw has found a way to tap these hormones so that receptive readers experience a sense of love’s intoxication, its joy and pain, as if “jacked-in” to its Matrix. Indeed, this may be the greatest book of poetry about being in love since Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, for like that great work Ms. Greenlaw has made the trajectory of a personal love story the heartbeat of this volume.