House Music

In her first collection, Kaufman celebrates daily life in poems about family, memory, art, the moon landing, even mammography. Unlike many contemporary poets, Kaufman uses rhyme often, and hers succeed musically and aren't stilted. Occasionally, she incorporates forms such as the villanelle (19-line poem with two repeating lines and two refrains) and the list poem, both of which she does well. These works make the familiar extraordinary; the first poem, "Waves," for example, transforms a trip to the hairdresser into an underwater sea experience in which "scissors flash like fish." In "These Lines Are Beams of Light," the poet takes something we see constantly, words flitting past on a computer screen, and makes them new: "they appear and disappear without pasts/ or futures, barely remembering those who// release them into the ether, like smoke." Kaufman also uses humor, as in the lines, "Pigeons almost choked/ by double chins of desire." A few longer entries are too verbose, especially "Sonatina" and "Anaphase." Alternatively, one of this reviewer's favorite poems is the spare, tight "Baton" in which Kaufman writes, "The only true spin/ was when it left the hand/ for two heartbeats." One of this poet's gifts is the ability to imbue tasks with emotional resonance. In a poem about her mother ironing, she describes knowing "about the marriage of pride and scorn,/ of scorch and starch, of perfection/ and negation."