The energy of the collection is richly informed by the tension between such short-line stanzas and the more sinuous and leisurely style of the longer poems. Over the cooling coffee, each faced his own estrangement. Alone I went to meet a previous engagement. The gift shoppe's jewelry boxes are glazed with broken shells. A blood-stained mattress dries in the Vacancy Motel.
Life is no version of living.
Life is just hell. The distant, starry color of the buildings, serene Italian marble in the sun, up close was whitewash, peeling, fly-blown. . . . You come at last to the conclusion, the city of your dreams is but a fraud. The realization here, expressed by a curious personality plausibly imagined, carries less of the bitter disillusionment that suffuses this brilliant, almost cheerless collection.