Blue Rose

May 7, 2018
In her first collection since 2004’s Sparrow, former California Poet Laureate Muske-Dukes adopts a multi-perspectival approach to narrative, exploring mortality in a post-modern, increasingly global, and digitized cultural landscape. As a multigenre writer (she also publishes fiction and criticism), Muske-Dukes draws from an array of literary resources, bringing lyrical language to bear on narrative. “Did you think// they’d sculpt ‘Art’ out of the arsenal I lent them?” asks God in “Creation Myth.” The work’s hybridity and genre fluidity are its great attractions, resisting easy categorization as verse, essay, story, or collage. Yet Muske-Dukes’s narrative impulse too often has the effect of detracting from the poems’ mystery, as when the speaker of “Orphanage” concludes that “there was no home of course: I knew there never was one.” Meanwhile, the luminous imagery—the “Kewpie-pouts,” “iron gates,” and “clumsy spit curls”—accomplish the difficult work of illuminating the poem’s emotional topography. “I was used to the wind, those long billow-topped months,” her speaker explains, allowing sensory details to convey the work’s philosophical and emotional resonances. The poems are strongest in these moments, which exemplify a purposeful withholding of artistic intent. Muske-Dukes delivers genre hybridity in an unexpected way, but the pieces frequently succumb to the pitfalls of prose, telling readers plainly how each element of the story “aligns peacefully at last.”

April 1, 2018
Muske-Dukes (Twin Cities, 2011) wields a finely calibrated matter-of-factness shot through with frissons of wonder as she reports on the shifting elements of dark and light in everyday moments, and tracks the physics of feeling?attraction and repulsion, chaos and sudden, rare, fleeting clarity. In her now poems of concern and dissent, Muske-Dukes observes a wildfire sky and a Ferris wheel of cosmic implications; muses on her experiences bringing poetry to West Point and prison; and, in Gun Control: A Triptych, writes of one brother who shoots another while horsing around, of a teacher and a school shooting, and, forging a bayonet fierceness, of the confounding worship, above all else, of the great God gun. In inspiriting contrast, she reclaims the stories and honors the crazy strength of gifted, against-the-odds women, from writer and librarian Ina Coolbrith (1841-1928), a poet laureate of California, as was Muske-Dukes, to chemist Rosalind Franklin (1920-58) and poet Adrienne Rich. The impulse is to read these poems of keen attunement and ready cadence quickly, yet?understated and hard-hitting?they do intensify in power as they percolate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)