Title: A poet with chops
Product review: Chelsea Rathburn's The Shifting Line makes heavy use of iambic pentamater, but does so in a way that is both supple and sonorous. One doesn't come to such deft substitutions without years of hard work beforehand; clearly, this is a poet who has paid her dues. What appear on the surface to be mundane concerns and everyday scenes -- an argument in a restaurant, the school cafeteria social hierarchy -- are recast in meditative, even philosophical, terms by a poet with an unusually skilled ear. Look for a clever formal shift in the poem "In Praise of the Florida Manatee" and enjoy Rathburn's deft variations on the sonnet throughout the book. She also writes a masterful triolet and exhibits great flexibility and risk in poems like "Biopsy" and "Teaching Poetry at the School for the Blind." This is not a poetry of self-indulgence. It is a striking first book from a newer new formalist, and one from which any serious reader or writer of poetry will profit.
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