June 1, 2002
Eating Club In the nearly 60 short lyrics of Red to the Rind, Stan Rice's seventh collection, the poet's New Orleans summons vibrant descriptive panache: "The great Sugar kettles are brimful of beer and ice. The melt-water has turned the yard into dung. A gangplank of plastic grass Leads us over the muck." The book concludes with two long poems, "The Underworld" and "Dismemberments," which string together short "linked epiphanies" into a kind of Dantesque nightmare where Rice's speaker finds himself playing cards while "sitting in `Hitler's Bed' Like a cherry on an eclair With messed-up hair," and then popping out for a Viennese coffee and "The most delicious pastry I have ever tasted and the contradiction Between Deliciousness and Discipline, well The thought nearly makes breast-milk Come out of my penis."