Ange Mlinko, _Marvelous Things Overheard_

 I AM WAY, way behind with Ange Mlinko. The last book of hers I read was Shoulder Season, and there are at least three since then.

Marvelous Things Overheard  is a bit more linear, a bit less oblique, than Starred Wire, more in New Yorker territory. I thought of the New Yorker particularly as I was reading "Bliss Street," a poem that juxtaposes the relative privilege and security of Mlinko's current circumstances with the hazards and precariousness of her grandmother's circumstances growing up in eastern Europe--a graceful, lucid, subtle poem, but, you know, well-behaved--and sure enough, it was published in the New Yorker.

Rather like Paul Muldoon, though, Mlinko is not so domesticated as to never flash a streak of anarchy. "Wingandecoia" reminded me often of Muldoon with its audacious (near-)rhyming ("camera/emerald," "emerges/emeritus"), its gleeful rewiring of the villanelle, and its tragicomic handling of the founding and disappearance of the Roanoke Colony.

The volume's other long poem, "Cantata for Lynette Roberts," about a Welsh poet who is only beginning to be rediscovered, was the book's highlight, I thought. Both that poem and "Wingandecoia" demonstrated that Mlinko has a deft and confident touch with the architecture of a long poem.