Late Empire

October 1, 2017

Hayden Carruth Award winner Olstein (Radio Crackling, Radio Gone) here meditates on a world gone awry, limning in precise, beautifully modulated language both personal dislocation and the slings and arrows visited upon the community at large. Generally, the personal and the communal link and even merge. "Want rings out in the house/ of the self and in the self the self must live," says the opening poem adroitly before moving on to war-zone violence; those disaffected nights "you settled/ for take-out and a blindfold" unwind inevitably to animal extinction and the bitter observation that "Sometimes there's a glitch/ in the system. Fatal errors occur." Olstein tosses out so many smart apercus that one sometimes puzzles how a poem tracks from first line to last. But that's the point; as she says, "Strangled in fog, I offered/ logic in return," and her poems indeed have their own logical flow. In an excellent series of prose poems addressing a persona named Whistle, Olstein acknowledges "a great sadness in the air" while confirming that "today the world is here for us," and despite the occasional stretch she's able to hold such disparate ideas together while asking the big questions. VERDICT Sharp, approachable work for most readers.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 18, 2017
This timely yet elemental collection from Olstein (Little Stranger) unfolds where the exigencies and distractions of daily life brush up against the political, the ethical, and the existential. The whistle, an ambivalent sound, repeatedly intercedes as a refrain in the prose poems of the collection’s core, where such phenomena as school concerts, global warming, conversations among friends, animals in captivity, kidnappings, car radios, Kurt Cobain, and Godzilla make their presence known. “This world, Whistle, there’s nothing for it, what can we possibly say?” The whistle, fills the space where language is unable to reconcile the individual and the daily with the grand, historic, and often catastrophic ways in which “we all tear apart and are torn.” The extended prose blocks constitute just one of several modes, each of which occupies a distinct section in the book. The single-stanza meditations that open and close the collection mix humor, exposition, and lyrical beauty; relatively traditional sonnets offer wordplay and imagination; a numbered sequence of poems in tercets take Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space as source text and offer an apt ars poetica: “By clear-eyed words can one/ hear oneself close? The rote/ of the sea, the roar of, the glint.” Olstein’s profound and attentive poems reveal her formal dexterity and knack for spotting modernity’s absurdities: “Some days even business as usual seems rare.”