Dear All

Poetry. Michael Gottlieb’s DEAR ALL strikes a note of change to both Gottlieb’s style and his intentions to change society by holding up a mirror to it. The resulting social vanitas in DEAR ALL’s short lines make us think that the world might be different than we think it is. And the poetry certainly is different than we expect. The sonorous, lexical intricacy, social indignation and attention to imaginative, formal detail DEAR ALL presents to us undresses our intention in the public square.

In DEAR ALL Michael Gottlieb introduces a shorter line and a pared-down style, as paratactic as ever but with a new clipped clarity. Of course, Gottlieb is writer enough to abolish the neatness of this progression, as he does in the final long poem of this book, a wild mash-up of medical spam that reframes the book in terms of its formal inconsistency: Great stuff.–Steve Zultansky