The Sore Throat & Other Poems

How about someone from another planet?
—Peter Gizzi

This would make a great chorus for “Nosferatu.”
—Marjorie Welish

It’s the real thing.
—Keith Waldrop

Aaron Kunin believes that the part of yourself that you’re most ashamed of is interesting and can be used as material for art. The poems of The Sore Throat, his second collection, come out of self-imposed semiotic limitation, yet manifest a fully inhabited psychological environment. Within a limited vocabulary, Kunin finds hymn, epigram, ode, elegy, ballad, conversation, invective, confession, epitaph, inability, protest, love poem (praise, valentine, aubade, seduction, defense of inconstancy), riddle, cosmogony, theodicy, vanity, and misplaced concreteness. Combining formal procedure with a kind of automatic writing, The Sore Throat produces poems of unlikely, and heightened, sensitivity to nuances of feeling.