In “Blitz”: “Secretly seeing the silence of seduction, finding ways of woe in the wind, knowing time will kick around the heel of his boots no matter what town.” The presence of literary devices and awareness of lineation is evident everywhere. Short bursts of reading are more rewarding, since each piece reveals its surprises sometimes only on second and third reading. Given the intensity of the images and form, what makes it absorbing also makes it dense. Her work makes formal poetic devices and rhetorical devices almost showy, evident, and intense in what is a most captivating and impressive collection of poems. The collection in whole plays within boundaries of formalism as applied to the prose poem. The poems comprising Mouth Trap demonstrate sonic play, prosodic acrobatics, and wit both subtle and overt, sometimes in the same line. Tarring these poems with that brush would be very hard to do. A novelist working in prose poetry risks the damning-with-faint-praise descriptor of someone whose poetry reads like that of a prose stylist’s. Rebbecca Brown’s collection of prose poems is the second book from a writer whose debut was the novel They Become Her.
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