Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words Stephen Yenser takesreaders on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised byhuman we... » 

Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words Stephen Yenser takesreaders on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised byhuman weakness. Set in sunny southern California and Greece the poems of BlueGuide cast the shadow of mortality and the tones are elegiac. Thiscombination of the deadly serious and the exuberant is natural Yenser notesafter all work and orgy share the same etymological root as do travailand travel pledge and play.Using various poetic modes Yenser offers here a quatrain written to name apainting by Dorothea Tanning a sequence of poems for his daughter anexcursive poem at once about Los Angeles and Baghdad and his father and a pettycriminal a group of prose poems set in penumbral bars some postcards to adead friend and a meditation prompted by a sojourn on a remote Aegean island.The most unexpected work is an assemblage of quotations and glosses in thetradition of the commonplace book except that in Yensers hands these entriesare densely interrelated.Praise for Stephen YenserYenser is a justly celebrated critic of Robert Lowell and James Merrill amongothers. . . . Yenser sees thae beauty that can arise from an intelligentplayfulness . . . . Above all Yenser has learned Merrills Freudian lessonhow quickly playfulness leads to the most uncomfortable central yet elusivepsychic content.Alan Williamson American Poetry Review «