Some Alphabets

It's in the gnarled wonders of its diction that John Latta's poetry has its most immediate charm. The 130 poems of Some Alphabets fizz between levels of diction-the demotic, the formal, the high theoretical, the archaic, the futuristic, the expansive, the pinched, the ordinary and the just plain weird-so that every sixteen-line stanza becomes a foray into the delightful unexpected.

Latta has always had a way with words, a kind of weighty insouciance everywhere evident in Rubbing Torsos and Breeze, his previous collections: the ability to spin out simultaneously concrete sensual observation, off-handed bon mot, and penetrating insight. Some Alphabets focuses that linguistic multi-tasking to an abbreviated, impacted pitch, and stirs into the mix a dark and glittering compost of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century language. . . . "Stubbled profligate, I / Paw th'ancients, who paw me."

-Mark Scroggins, from the Introduction

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Agincourt Press
Published: 10/19/2024
ISBN: 9781946328335
Pages: 157
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.64w x 0.43d