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Open Books: Events
November 20, 2008 07:30 PM
DAN KAPLAN & B.T. SHAW
These two poets each had first books published this year. Mr. Kaplan's
is Bill's Formal Complaint ($17.95 National Poetry Review). His comic,
surreal poems are written in a variety of forms, from a multiple-choice poem
and an index poem to free verse and sonnets featuring full rhyme and ten
syllable lines. The Bill of the title is seen from within and from a
distance. He translates, awkwardly, from Swedish, Hungarian, and English?!
It's written of Bill, "if he were a pole, he'd either be / aluminum or North
or ski."
B.T. Shaw's first book is This Dirty Little Heart ($14.95 Eastern
Washington). Her work has a jazzy snap to it, both in the fluid turns of
mind taken and in the musical flair of her lines: "Two stories down: / tall
drink of a man in leather and a blonde / in Byron's boots who leans against
/ a third of some distracted gender. / The signal turns, // we watch them
cross, / swim out of view -- as later we will, too."
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