Olallieberries

Stephen Burt

  • BuyChronic: Poems by D.A. Powell
    Graywolf, 79 pp, $20.00, February 2009, ISBN 978 1 55593 516 0

The first collection published by D.A. Powell, Tea (1998), looked oddly like a smart restaurant menu: Wesleyan University Press manufactured a shiny, green and gilt hardback, six inches tall and nine inches wide, to accommodate Powell’s very short poems and very long lines. The promise the cover gave was borne out inside, where those long lines flaunted multiple midline stops, unruly punctuation (stopping where the grammar said go), terse yet explicit depictions of gay sex and profuse quotation from disco hits:

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