Sentences and Rain

September 21, 2015
Equi (Click and Clone) relishes the stark, overlooked beauty of the quotidian in her curious, winding, fanciful 13th collection. The book is a “slinky cylinder of spirals/ leading to an escape hatch in the sky,” its circuitous and plainspoken poems endlessly unfolding upon an expansive plane of strange new ideas and images. Equi makes room for “things both ordinary/ and sublime,” and as “one thing is always in the process// of overtaking another,” moments of joy await each twinge of sadness. Her “carefree, short-sleeved/ sorrow” may be the unavoidable result of being so attuned to the totality of her surroundings, but there is equal evidence of a steadfast love for the world, particularly “the excess of the story—that which it cannot contain.” In an effort to catalogue everything, Equi works on the “repositioning/ of the old line,” hoping that the “New compartments created” will help adequately capture these multifarious experiences. While some poems feel like experiments that don’t quite work, the majority possess that quintessential Equian magic and epigrammatic concision: “Soothing because they put you/ someplace impossible to locate.” Equi’s imagery and turns of phrase are strong as ever, and readers will be swept away in the deluge, able to “witness the Rapture/ and still make it home in time for dinner.”

October 1, 2015

These 75 lighthearted poems are reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, whose work is referenced in several instances. In one poem, he's the good doctor. Another, written to celebrate his birthday, alludes to lines from "The Red Wheelbarrow." And a third, "Literary Lipsticks," a cento composed of lines from various poems, begins with references to two of Williams's. Equi, short-listed for Canada's Griffin Poetry Prize for Ripple Effect, includes several other centos as well as two epithalamiums (poems written to celebrate a wedding) and several near-haiku. The poems mix cliches with metaphors and play with the thought sparks generated by fusing them, as in "Ode to Distraction" ending with "One says: 'I love you to distraction, '/ meaning, in a way, I can't stand/ to actually see or think of you." VERDICT If you can imagine it, you can probably find it here in one of Equi's lists of objects both real and surreal. There's the robot scarecrow, the bluebird gargoyle, the roman candles, the gypsy eyes, the vanilla orchid, the snowflake, and the photocopy of the snowflake. Equi asks: Which of those last two items do you consider more beautiful? Then she provides her own mostly satisfying answer. For most poetry collections.--C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.