Strange Elegies

Poetry. I know of no one who knows more than Mac Wellman about the interstices between desire and nonsense, as well as those between the po-mo psyche’s inevitable nihilistic impulses, and whatever the legacy left by our prehensile ancestors, those comic apes staring out of the frame with their classic bananas. These poems are heady fragmented forays into thatuncharted territory. Poetry needs Mac Wellman the way fiction once needed Swift and Pynchon–Mary Jo Bang. Mac Wellman’s poetry is an exuberant expedition into the mysteries locked inside words. Meaning slips and slides along the white-watersound-streams he navigates, catching and jolting at robust archaisms, liberated diacritics, and endlessly surprising figurations. Here, the elegiac tradition swerves from its pensive ways and pays playful and rigorous tribute to the syllabic micro-dramas that animate our lives–Una Chaudhuri. Mac Wellman’s previous books of poems are MINIATURE and A SHELF IN WOOP’S CLOTHING.