All Black Everything

by Weston Cutter

Weston Cutter's poems are ecstatic--reaching out, pulling an eyelid over, pulling everything in. Emerson's transparent eyeball and Ashbery's convex mirror combine in symphony, with the Peterson's Field Guide to North American Birds for a libretto and a train derailment for an orchestra. That's Cutter's address. Keep walking till you see light streaming from the chimneys and the windows every moving thing is crowded in. What's inside: more zoology than zoo, more everything than ever. --Jake Adam York Cutter's world is vividly and joyfully detailed--here be licking and willows and liquor and birds and and and--but his book's central subject is its thrilling syntax, which rushes wild, stops short, tests, sniffs, hesitates, and gusts away again, ever on the verge of chaos but never quite out of control. It's a delirious ride, equal parts scary and beauty; you'll enjoy every minute you dare to. --Joel Brouwer Weston Cutter's poems are accelerants of invention--highly flammable as they careen adeptly past matches, burlap, and gods on fire. What the poems give light to is what gets traded, lost, or abandoned as our past and possible lives lose their force, and we are left to claim the improbable, persistent self. Such awareness results in the restless hilarity of never quite knowing whether "the neighbor's dog's barking at meaningless blowing leaves or someone approaching finally with the axe." Disconcerting, really, to have this much fun racing to watch the fire and finding it's our own house in flames. --Jennifer Boyden

55 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Natalie Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

I come back to this book again and again. If people ask me what poetry they should read, this is in the top five.