Hilarity (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
In a time when there's little to laugh about, Patty Seyburn's Hilarity is an epic punch line: sparkling and smart. I rely on her sort of music eliding joy and pain and the echoes in the great church of disbelief to keep us all sane and savvy. Read Hilarity and weep, and laugh. And get better because of it. --Carol Muske-DukesPatty Seyburn's Hilarity is a skeptic's playground, in which we learn that Dante layered Hell like a taco salad, that God created the ocean with waves in tiers instead of vertical, and an escaping butterfly triggers the rhyme of reason with treason. Seyburn is also mistress of nocturnal phantasmagoria, in a series of insomnia and dream and nightmare poems that dredge the silt and mud of memory. Is she also, however, a closet romantic? You will have to read the seven poker-faced chapters of the title poem to find out. --Alicia Ostriker