The Hotel Oneira: Poems
Author of 10 books of poetry, including 2 prize-winning collections, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (2003) and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (2008), Kleinzahler draws from such eclectic and unexpected sources as popular music, biology, and abstruse climatology in his latest book. With a ventriloquist’s verve and frenetic shifts in emphasis, Kleinzahler meditates on 1990s pop icons Whitney Houston and Michael Bolton, mimics early twentieth-century “singing poet” Vachel Lindsay, and channels an obscure English diarist’s “exquisite atmography,” or weather journal, with such exhalations as “balsamic panspermical panacea juice of heaven!” The book’s most shimmering verses evoke peculiar horticultural visions, from “chrysanthemums in a coal mine” to “hollyhocks in their fenced-in plots, / red purple apricot.” Kleinzahler adds entries from a “Summer Journal,” offering glimpses of dusk’s bright nasturtium, beds of soft primrose, and “ribands of damask, of silk, then a fine rain, / more a mist.” Kleinzahler has hewn an original, lyrically chimerical atmography of his own,  a stroll through a polyvocal dreamscape, an impressive addition to the oeuvre of an unpredictably innovative poet. --Diego Báez