Poems of the Black Object
Readers lucky enough to spend time with Wilson's uncommonly varied second book will find achingly self-conscious short prose essays, erotic verse about gay sexuality, demolition jobs directed at racial stereotypes, and plenty of genre-busting, metafictional, forward-looking hybrid forms. The Black Object Gets Kinky at Home shows my human// figure excised/ in the chest// of drawers, hole/ in my head// as I rope,/ asphyx to zero; The Black Object's Elasticity, a prose poem (or essay), finds ways to evade abuse, some of which have to do with finding a replica of your abuser. Admirers of D. A. Powell, or even of Dennis Cooper, should take note. Yet the book gets stranger still: with the sequence of prose poems and prose experiments in what Wilson calls a Vergelioian persona, giddy, disturbing jokes and textual games take center stage. Wilson zips back and forth between investigations of real rough sex (What does man A hope to touch? B wants me. C is the owner of a big fat hand) and postmodern investigations of images and empty signs, from dead porn stars to newsworthy disasters: Your skin is pink,/ then opaque, caramelized then burned.(Dec.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.