Late Empire

Hayden Carruth Award winner Olstein (Radio Crackling, Radio Gone) here meditates on a world gone awry, limning in precise, beautifully modulated language both personal dislocation and the slings and arrows visited upon the community at large. Generally, the personal and the communal link and even merge. "Want rings out in the house/ of the self and in the self the self must live," says the opening poem adroitly before moving on to war-zone violence; those disaffected nights "you settled/ for take-out and a blindfold" unwind inevitably to animal extinction and the bitter observation that "Sometimes there's a glitch/ in the system. Fatal errors occur." Olstein tosses out so many smart aperçus that one sometimes puzzles how a poem tracks from first line to last. But that's the point; as she says, "Strangled in fog, I offered/ logic in return," and her poems indeed have their own logical flow. In an excellent series of prose poems addressing a persona named Whistle, Olstein acknowledges "a great sadness in the air" while confirming that "today the world is here for us," and despite the occasional stretch she's able to hold such disparate ideas together while asking the big questions.