Some Alphabets

It's in the gnarled wonders of its diction that John Latta's poetry has its most immediate charm. The 130 poems of Some Alphabets fizz between levels of diction-the demotic, the formal, the high theoretical, the archaic, the futuristic, the expansive, the pinched, the ordinary and the just plain weird-so that every sixteen-line stanza becomes a foray into the delightful unexpected. Latta has always had a way with words, a kind of weighty insouciance everywhere evident in Rubbing Torsos and Breeze, his previous collections: the ability to spin out simultaneously concrete sensual observation, off-handed bon mot, and penetrating insight. Some Alphabets focuses that linguistic multi-tasking to an abbreviated, impacted pitch, and stirs into the mix a dark and glittering compost of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century language. . . . "Stubbled profligate, I / Paw th'ancients, who paw me." -Mark Scroggins, from the Introduction