Elisa Gabbert writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times and is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, including Normal Distance; The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays; The Word Pretty; L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems; The Self Unstable; and The French Exit.
Smart, funny, subtle, highly inventive, and highly recommended. If you parked a brain at the midpoint between TV ad language, contemporary poetry, social mediaspeak, hip-hop, and workplace cant--and then downloaded its contents--you'd get something like this book. Voluptuousness seems to be a meditation on contemporary language, its trash and beauty and rhythms.
These are fine poets singly, and together they're a knockout. I so so admire truly witty, playful poems, and it's very cool to have all this work in one place so I don't have to scour the 'net for it. Great stuff.