The angular outrageous wit & blunt swerve logic all over and underneath Catherine Wagner’s Of Course charge the poems into complete shapeliness, sex reanimating and disarming all pre-arranged affectments. She pitches and cuts the sounds in the right-wrong order and vice-versus, constantly reinventing an already dynamic syntax and sense of rhythm in order to handle scale’s more alarming manifestations. And in their various colliding meantimes, while the horizon gives head to the sun like guillotine, these poems expose that abundance of crumbling reality-samples our current public surface wishes to replace real idiosyncrasy with — and put into play the kinds of danger unpredictable humor poses to power. ANSELM BERRIGAN
Focused and facing perceptual event, history, presence, and possession, the incredible poems in Wagner’s Of Course put politics where the mouths are, question structures of language and domination. Here the poems act, disclose, and encounter— inquiring, multivalent— as they delight and give serious pause. Sex, the weather, insect song, pleasure, money, power, Ohio golf courses: the poems reside in rebellion, are multispecied wonders, move with investigative purpose. I’m wild for this book. HOA NGUYEN
