Crash's Law

by Karen Volkman

Through myth, dream, and sensual detail, the poems of this remarkable first collection portray a hectic, sensuous world plagued by desire for psychic orientation and coherence. The book begins and ends in extremity: the opening poem, "Infernal," evokes the searing realm of an actual and metaphoric Miami; in "New Heaven, New Earth," the final poem, the speaker seeks a path through dense woods amid a blinding, obliterating blizzard. In their longing to define a set of terms for spiritual survival, the poems wrestle with disjunctions and relations between mystery and reality, the metaphysical and the daily, intellect and eros, self and other, world and body. It is the ambition of these essentially lyric poems to merge an evocation of contemporary consciousness with the oldest conventions of cry and song.