Dreamlife of a Philanthropist

With a salve in one hand and a burcher’s knife in the other, Janet Kaplan offers her masterful third collection, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen prize in Poetry. The prose poems and sonnets in Dreamlife are packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet’s ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation. These are poems that can never quite abandon the hope that life–and language-are worthy pursuits; but they never offer up easy assurances about the benefits of humanity to anyone or anything. Get ready for dogs that wail and overtake the scene; an invitation to make love on a mattress of ants; and the philanthropist of the title, who dreams that people are tuned into fish. It’s good luck and bad in random but equal measure, Kaplan writes in Life and Times.