The Do Over

In her third full collection (after The Cold War), Ossip presents poems that explore celebrity, mourn a loved one who has died (the mysterious A.), and share vignettes of daily life. The poet employs many modernistic and postmodernistic techniques: the use of white space, varying line and font sizes, repetition, capitalization, and freestanding punctuation marks. That said, several of the poems have a traditional stanza format, a few are prose poems, and one is not a poem at all but a short story. Ossip's strengths include humor, a distinct way of looking at the world, and a fearless approach to the famous: in "The Road Trip and the Apron String" she says, "A spurt of attention yields up/ me and Keats, iris to iris." At times, her phrasing veers toward slogans or makes little sense: "Perseverance is beautiful, and embarrassing./ How many institutions of power remain?/ Several. Several…." Too many metaphors either fall flat or seem so unconnected as to interrupt the flow of the poem, as in the long piece "What Is Death": "Morphine is the prototype narcotic drug and is the standard against which all other/ opiates are tested/ like a mother's arms." And in the poem, "Words to a Newborn," the poet advises, "You'll learn many procedures/ for mastering everyday life. You'll learn/ to think like a computer and like a plant."