Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Poems

Recently, turning from poetry to prose, Stephen Dunn, acclaimed as one of the strongest poets of his generation, began to experiment with short related prose pieces that played off one another in the manner of jazz improvisations. I was interested in the tangentially related, each piece a discrete paragraph, sometimes an act of definition or redefinition, sometimes a description, occasionally a story. The resulting pairs, vehicles for meditation and exploration, cover such subjects as Scruples/Saints,
Hypocrisy/Precision,
Money/ Indulgence, and Anger/Generosity. For Dunn, hypocrisy is a social virtue, money a religion without a theology. Throughout, Dunn takes a personal ownership of words that the dictionary merely defines objectively. The wisdom and startling verbal turns we’ve come to expect from his poetry are everywhere in the ninety miniatures (forty-five pairs) that compose this volume. There may be debts to Ponge and Calvino here, but Stephen Dunn has made prose pairs a fascinating genre of his own.