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| All-Night Lingo Tango
ISBN: 9780822990949
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Pittsburgh Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Language & Literature;
Chatty and whimsical, literary and (at its best) laugh-out-loud funny, Hamby's fourth outing begins with a tour-de-force: monorhyme. All the long lines in Hamby's two-page "Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties that Plague Me Like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory" (yes, that's the title) rhyme, or at least half-rhyme, with one another: "Who are you? Not the hippie chick/ of your early twenties or the Sears and Roebuck/ Christian drudge your mother became, though Satan still stalks/ you...." Most of the volume pursues the same jittery, entertaining pace, with frequent reference to baby-boom-era popular culture, especially film: "Here's to the movie queens with their nose jobs, snow jobs, blow jobs." Long-lined "Odes," most in monorhyme or in loose couplets, give her extroverted, digressive imagination free play, reminiscent by turns of Albert Goldbarth and Ogden Nash: "I was a vegetarian,/ so I know food hang-ups like a Rastafarian/ knows ganja." Hamby (Babel) also includes a few dozen 13-line sonnets, more restrained, less forceful, and less personal, but determined to juxtapose the ultra-contemporary and the famously literary: "Nietzsche Explains the Ubermensch to Lois Lane." Hamby's autobiographical asides and festive attitudes may seem, to some, like nothing new: yet, often enough, their sheer verve should entertain. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Barbara Hamby is writer-in-residence at Florida State University. She is the author of two chapbooks and three previous poetry collections: The Alphabet of Desire; Delirium; and Babel, winner of the 2003 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including the Paris Review, the Iowa Review, the Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry 2000 . |
