Ish Klein, _Consolation and Mirth_

(ISH KLEIN HAS a brand new book out this month, by the way, which I am not going to write about here, having written a review of it for a more prestigious website. That review should be available before too long, I hope. Her new book is called The New Sun Time and is very good.)

Consolation and Mirth (2015) has a middle section of twenty-one old-fashioned riddle poems. What is a riddle poem? A reasonably well-known example is Emily Dickinson's "A Route of Evanescence," to which the answer is "hummingbird." "My Life had Stood--a Loaded Gun" I have seen described as a riddle poem no one has ever solved. Klein's riddles have solutions, but I have to admit they have all defeated me. so far. I plan to keep trying, though.

As in Moving Day, Klein uses couplets and terza rima fairly regularly in this collection, and the movement of the poems sometimes takes some swift, hard turns:

You move to the right so that I must follow with my mind.
I turn and the drunk dog is asleep, the hand is nowhere visible.
I say the hand! The hand! My bucket becomes a red vinyl collar 

You say you will wear it!

Here as elsewhere, my favorite Klein poems are the longer ones that go on unpredictable odysseys, with lots of whoa-nelly hard turns, then end by zeroing in on the heart of the question. "Circular Runes" belongs in that category, as does "Eggheads and Rejects In and Around Science and Fiction Society," and especially "Like on the Subject of the Icebreaker," which ends thus--

There were others who are better at meeting the beings 

the snow has not yet touched and touching them. 

They are not so likely to get mixed up personally. 

They were us once.