Soul Data

"Soul Data is rarely compounded--of wit and music, surface elegance and intellectual depth, quirk and quandary. Its sensual intelligence is on high alert, and the sheer unsheerness of its language--all its densities and textures--is a linguiphiliacal delight. Unmistakeably American (the poetry's occasions and its cadences alike serve for signature) it has the jinx-meister's humors about it. There's a dark streak, too, an eye for the natural indifferences that border the spotlit human heats. A fine rhetorical savvy, in a mind inclined to the chillier depths: among poetic gifts these days it's an uncommon conjunction, a gift of mysteries, like the sight (across a night pond's surface) of bright-blue shooting star: one hopes the other humans get to see it."--Heather McHugh V [Linoleum] South of Spokane Street, a gear works turns its teeth--shadows in a cavern, through the cycles of a drop-forge piston, heft themselves and recoil in a dark rain of sparks, the echo off the blocks-- pa-tang!--arriving late, repeats itself again, a ceaseless, a remorseless hammering home, a point made and lost in the patterns of work. Across the street, a hunkered stretch of houses, swing sets and cyclone fencing, a clatch of cars. The agent shrugs--"It's zoned Residential/ Light Industrial"--pa-tong! A lunatic fringe of gladiolus fronts the walkways and the rows of empty rooms we roll by at low idle.