Some nice lines but no coherence. Ending every line with stop, please or please advise a moderately interesting failure in form. ( )

I found this alternately great and disappointing. The language and juxtaposition of images is GREAT. The subject matter is the speaker's grief over her father's death, which I didn't have enough patience for. Her pov is detached, dissociated, depresses, and more or less completely unable to deal with his loss, so *everything* becomes an aphorism to be telegraphed back to society/reality, of which the speaker has no part because she's isolated herself so completely. She's essentially catatonic. All she does is observe and refuse to feel and sleep.

But again, Morrison's language is gorgeous, clever, and quotable. I'd rate this book a 5 on its ability to make me read and reread lines for their imagery, music, and impact. But.

I've dealt with grief enough that I kind of want to slap the speaker until she lets the tears out and can tell the stories about her father that she considers to be only something to throw away.

Which, well, for a book of poetry, is arguably a success? She's getting an emotional response from me, even if it isn't what she may have hoped for.

I'd rather read Donald Hall's Without, which is his collection about his wife Jane Kenyon's slow death from cancer and his life in the aftermath of her death. It is gut-wrenching and devastating and guaranteed to make you cry, but it's also a catharsis from which Rusty Morrison flees far, far into the opposite direction. ( )