Zirconia
"Minnis' effort is, in a word, brilliant, as the titular wink suggests. It is not, however, glaringly imitative, though the demonology it conjures is not unlike Sexton and Plath's... ...There is something at once delightfully retro (read Nancy Sinatra) and tragically hip about Zirconia--a vision and revision that takes in the best of Anne Carsen, C.D. Wright, and Alice Notley--and makes it playful, even campy. Zirconia's prose interludes ('Report on the Babies,' 'The Skull Rings,' 'The Torturers,' and 'The Aquamarine') represent Minnis at her most surreally deadpan, while giving the reader a badly-needed break from the gazillions of dime-store ellipses. In poetic prose matching Ponge tone for odd tone, Minnis rests the reader at 'Report on the Babies,' a close encounter with infants who make babbling overture to a childless speaker whose dark tone resembles Poe's, given feminine intuition, an hour of down time, and a double espresso... ...Zirconia's glimmering phraseology, its 'loose stone' parlance, must be read to be fully appreciated, sprinkled, as it is, expertly across the page. While other experiments with fragmentation, notably Alice Notley's recent work, overwhelm both the eye and cortex, Minnis is a maestro when it comes to word burnishing. The poems achieve their magnificence and translucence as much by space as by space interrupt. The word amalgams, both Latinate and vernacular, give the collection a characteristic alchemy evident in the decadent..."--Zachary Jack, The Black Warrior Review