Vertical Elegies 5: The Section [Paperback]

SAM TRUITT is author of the collection Anamorphosis Eisenhower. His work has appeared in such literary journals as Verse, Ploughshares, and Fence, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2002. Truitt currently lives in New York City.

Imagine moving at the speed of thought through a sense-engulfing place—a city street, carnival, airport lobby . . . or your life. You have no time to process these sounds, sights, smells, and other psycho-sensory bulges—but no way either to keep them from flooding the inner world you're forever on the verge of sorting out. That, in part, is the experience of reading these sixty-nine sonnets, each of them a multidimensional, kaleidoscopic crossroad where organic form, awareness, memory/history, intellect, and the human heart merge into specificity, like light at the end of a tunnel.

The Boston Review has said this of Truitt's poetry: "Cunning formal maneuverings provide the distance and displacement needed to rattle the teeth of syntax and alter the current beat. As a reader, one gets caught up in the frenzy. There is the pleasure of verbal abandon and the reassurance of visual control. There is the perpetually keyed-up anticipation of anything-could-happen-here." And it does.

Here is word from the other side of the implacable mirror—as if a contemporary Everyman might still be able to speak and ourselves be still able to hear him. This extraordinary sequence of poems is fact not only of a brilliant poet's arrival but equally of a determined vision of our degraded world, a last warning, so to speak, before there's nothing left to say.

Pierces the cosmic veil with New York-school-esque humor and downright irreverence, lifting this sequence above holistic atmospherics to wrestle with the knottier, irolă!