Revolver (Kuhl House Poets)
Starred Review. Inspired by the variety of objects--such as the Singer sewing machine and an 80-blade sportsman's knife--presented at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (a kind of proto-world's fair), Schiff's astonishing second collection owes its title, and that of its whirlwind first poem, to another such object, the Colt rapid fire revolver. As in her debut,Worth, Schiff uses fashion houses and designers as delegates for the material world, effortlessly placing contemporary references beside mid-19th-century objects and ideas, encompassing all the history in between: "Might I, if there's one in stock, be sent the/ Ralph Lauren Winchester Tote/ shaped like the feedbags I've seen strapped on the/ fierce muzzles of the horses in pictures/ children are shown to depict/ for them how tasks, such as the/ feeding of horses, were accomplished in/ the Old West." The scope is dizzyingly wide, yet each shift in these poems feels necessary, and Schiff's long, beautiful sentences and relentless attention to language, history and the mystery of the human heart make these poems both thrillingly daunting and compulsively readable. This book springs from an imagination and vocabulary so surprising and intriguing that, in many poems, every line is a revelation.(Oct.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.