description: William Wenthe's Birds of Hoboken frankly considers the Postmodern assumption that our every view of reality is a "maybe," he concedes, "we're invented / by a form-/ `love' like syntax/ the theorist might say." And if his volume is rich in ornithological erudition, Nature does not show itself there as the correspondent force of the Romantics but as "a realm inalienably not his own." The author even allows for "Danger in mediations." Yet Wenthe simultaneously stresses the half-truth of such trendy rather than merely theorizing presence into absence, indifferent to any loss in the process; rather than adopting deconstruction's essential nihilism, whereby our "Fictions" (to cite the title of his eloquent final poem) automatically reduce themselves to inconsequence, in his brilliant first collection the writer affirms our capacity to craft crucial aesthetic, social and domestic relations. Indeed, in Birds of Hoboken, craft is supremely and everywhere evident, in all its therefore, to read a poem like "Shadblow," say, is to see how far from quaint a term like "beautiful" shall remain, so long as the likes of William Wenthe continue to practice. -SYDNEY LEA
language: English
title: Birds of Hoboken: Poems
titlecomplete: Birds of Hoboken: Poems
ratings_count: 7
publisher: Orchises Pr