Potts is a young poet who settled in San Francisco after studying at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the late eighties. This is a strong book, in part, because Potts successfully combines the lyrical, personal approach associated with Iowa, and the theoretical, apersonal styles of West Coast Language poetry. While most of the poems in Collision Center are strongly rooted in the lyric tradition, they also redefine the 'self' that Potts found in Iowa. Here the personal, authorial self, is in continual collision, if you will, with the theatrical, speculative, imaginary, and textual selves in the book which seek to qualify its authority. Under the house an orchard smolders like coals.
Huge automobiles are their own angels.
The world and the imagination reassert themselves and in doing so break up the static image of self. Potts' interest in Language poetry is indicated in the only epigraph in the book. It is one of the strengths of Potts' writing that he is able to engage Language poetry without resorting to either blind mimicry or knee-jerk rejection. Collision Center , however, doesn't strike a balance between the singular, subjective territories of Iowa Writers Workshop poetry and the densely populated, politically charged, urban landscape of Language poetry. The only striking going on here is the striking implied in the title.