A More Human Face

Poetry. Actually even if/the British German second-rate art scholars/in Florentine restaurants don't/like vulgar American women, I do./I am one... (from In Fact) Vulgar and American after the style of Frank O'Hara or James Schuyler, Donna Brook's poems refuse to hide behind irony or artifice in their relentless, often witty drive to Tell the Truth, as one title commands. This combination of lineated poems and prose poems are works of examination-self-examination and excited peering at the rest of the world in equal measure: The minutiae of other people's lives may appear to be seen only under the microscope and yet any wriggling detail can be the substance. (from Diagnostics) These poems engage the substance of details both large and small, in work that tells a truth beyond intentions or fact. (-Robert Creeley)