NONFICTION

House of Fact, House of Ruin

by Tom Sleigh
Graywolf. Feb. 2018. 120p. ISBN 9781555977979. $16. POETRY
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In Sleigh's tenth collection (others include Station Zed, Army Cats, and Space Walk), the Kingsley Tufts Award winner leans heavily on pathos to deliver stories of war that read like prose. Sleigh often slips into self-indulgence masked, as the book's own summary optimistically declares, as "selfhood and self-estrangement." The collection is filled with the brand of poetry that treats the form as sacred, which is to say it lacks the tension associated with writers who, like Robert Pinsky, demonstrate facility with the range of human emotion and of what is the line in poetry.
VERDICT Reading all the way through this collection proves a grueling, humorless trek, not unlike watching Andy Warhol's 320-minute film Sleep (1963). Best reserved for fans of Sleigh's poetry.
Reviewed by Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH , Jan 01, 2018
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