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Review title: Like seeing Kyoto on valium, but more fractured than that.
Product review: "This is despair" is one of the recurring fragments in New Time, and "being depressed is enhanced-- by the rim?" is another. Some find this book full of sublime poetry, but this reader found it full of elegant, smug, and fragmentary babble; the effect is like one of seeing Kyoto on valium, but the impact is more fractured and disturbing than that. I urge this poet to work out more, to see more, to connect to other people and the world beyond her own intense solipsism in love with its own twists and terms. The cold war of the US Scalapino hothouse is over, and despair and preciosity are not enough to engage this fallen fallen world. Go back to Go on this book, or listen to Basho or Dionne Warwick for some beauty that knows more than its own same-old language gaming. "New Time" is not new, just repetition of the same strategies times 94 pages.
