How Late Desire Looks

Opening with the title poem, when the speaker's encounter with a married neighbor lasts "one minute / longer than intended," this scrupulously crafted debut shows us, to quote Jorie Graham, "that perfection can't be kept, / only its perfect instances." In dense lyrics, prose poems, and even double sestinas, consummated desire shatters into restraint, refusal, reciprocity, and finally, despair. Although Roberts plainly acknowledges that the self must "open into" the "harm's way" of...
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Opening with the title poem, when the speaker's encounter with a married neighbor lasts "one minute / longer than intended," this scrupulously crafted debut shows us, to quote Jorie Graham, "that perfection can't be kept, / only its perfect instances." In dense lyrics, prose poems, and even double sestinas, consummated desire shatters into restraint, refusal, reciprocity, and finally, despair. Although Roberts plainly acknowledges that the self must "open into" the "harm's way" of experience, a quandary of detail hinders longer poems such as "Fugue," which packs so much operatic theme and minutiae that it collapses into itself, like a black hole. More often, "entire worlds of possibility" are uncovered in neglected recollections and everyday phenomena. Thus a pill becomes a country; an inability to breathe provokes a moving meditation concluding that death often "last[s] only a day," but the passions that make us human, such as fear and memory, "last longer." AUTHOR: Katrina Roberts, a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, works as a freelance journalist and teaches at the Harvard Extension School and Boston University. Her poems have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in many publications, including the anthologies Life on the Line and Best American Poetry 1995. Among her awards are two Garrison Medals in poetry, a Le Baron Russell Briggs Literary Fellowship, and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the St. Botolph Foundation.