Shame / Shame

April 1, 2015
Single-author poetry collections are usually named after particular poems or lines in them, less often thematically. But Becker takes the latter tack in his engaging first book of prose and free-verse poems. Bending to the expectation that prose narrates, he fashions miniature storiesanecdotes, jokes maybeabout not humiliation but existential embarrassment, the conviction that surely being human shouldn't entail the feelings it does. Maybe that's where shame comes from: something visceral from the nothing there emerges and you want to cover it. These pieces' predicaments are the likes of having the woman you've made love with in the night plop on your lap in the morning in front of your unsuspecting friends, feeling sexual tension between yourself and a teenager at a nearly deserted workout center on New Year's Eve, and being a small guy in a sports bar full of bruisers who has to ask about the shot placed before himalmost painfully familiar circumstances, all. Besides prose poetry, Becker has also mastered e. e. cummings' skinny, crawl-down-the-page poem, to similar, gotta-read-it-again effect.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)