The Math Campers

September 21, 2020
The meditative fifth collection from poet and critic Chiasson (Bicentennial) invites the reader to witness the poet’s processes of creation, retrieval, and revision as a writer and dreamer, father and son. Framed by ekphrastic poems that gloss murals by David Teng Olsen adorning the walls of the poet’s home, the book works by a loose Russian-doll principle: just as the murals reflect and refract details from the lives of the poet and his immediate family, so do these nested poems. As a teenager, the poet prays “that art/ would sometime send a ladder from the sky,” and that he might “become the love child/ of Sylvia Plath, Ozzy, and Alex DeLarge.” Years later, he finds himself “almost Ozzy, mansplaining/ to my eleven-year-old son the photo/ of a Louis Quatorze gilt dildo he found in our cloud.” Intimations of social crisis and environmental disaster glow on the horizon, “Caskets line up for the slip-n-slide./ A collarbone surfboards down the alley./ Through the mudslide we humans wade,” but the book centers on intimate dramas of adolescence, middle age, masculinity, and literary genealogy (poetic allusions from Milton and Eliot to Merrill and Bidart abound). These beautifully crafted poems are a memorable addition to Chiasson’s singular oeuvre.

September 1, 2020

This new collection from New Yorker poetry critic Chiasson (Bicentennial Poems) takes a deep dive into the mind of the poet and the objects that inspire his poetry--at the very moment the poet is being inspired. The book captures (or tries to) the creator's mind-set and winds up replicating for the reader the act of creation, allowing and inviting readers to participate in that act. In a sense, it is reminiscent of M.S. Escher's famous lithograph "Drawing Hands." In one poem, a narrator (Chiasson himself) stays in the apartment of deceased poet James Merrill, reading the poems in which Merrill described sunlight and its shifting colors as it moved across his walls. Meanwhile, the narrator is watching and describing sunlight moving across those same walls and illuminating them as Merrill described it. With the reader immersed in the alternating voices and times, the poem emerges and becomes the voices and times of the reader. VERDICT This difficult though engaging book brims with paradox, double meanings, incremental repetition, and startling metaphors, as when Chiasson tells the reader to step away from the page, so that "together we will ponder who imagined whom...." Best for academic libraries.--C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.