Then, Suddenly (Pitt Poetry Series)

Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: "~Glad to see someone else (and Kevin Canty, no less) thinks this book is good. I read the first stanza and immediately knew it was for keeps. It's a book of poems about a book of poems, about an author of a book of poems, about the aboutness of an author making a book of poems."~ happen up front, center stage.

Rating:
Summary: the bomb
Review: An amazing book of poems, or a book of amazing poems, or both. The bongo-madness rhythms of the voice linger in your head after you put the book down. Serious without being solemn, playful without being silly. I read this book first time through in a single sitting, and when I was done I knew that I had started somewhere and ended up somewhere else, though the precise names for either place eluded me. A very interesting, very smart, very pleasurable book.

Rating:
Summary: Poet Thinks Too Much
Review: I saw some wonderful cagy things going on in Emanuel's first two books. But now comes THEN, SUDDENLY, which deconstructs itself word by word as it goes along, and in a very transparent manner. (The everyperson's answer to Jorie Graham will have to wait.) THEN, TO TOP IT ALL OFF the poems are flat. The life seems to have been revised right out of them. "When the reader's radar tracked me down" Emanuel writes. What happened? The answer is, You thought about it too much and the result is stiff, self-conscious poetry.