TRINIDAD CAME UP with an ingenious way of organizing the book. Most "new and selected" volumes tuck the new poems at the end, but Trinidad put them in front and gave that section its own title, "Black Telephone." The section is about the length of a generous collection (120 pages), so I would not be annoyed to plunk down $19 for this even had I already purchased the volumes from which the "selected poems" were selected.
I don't know Trinidad's work well enough to say whether "The Black Telephone" is a staying-in-the-wheelhouse collection or a radical-departure collection, but I will say that (a) Trinidad's work is distinctive and (b) I like it. He combines elements I never would have expected to be combined: a passion for Sylvia Plath with a passion for Patty Duke, for instance, or thirty-four haiku based on episodes of the 1960s television series Peyton Place, or a list in the style of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book that includes "The voice of Dusty Springfield." . Much of the work is based on and quite candid about his own memories and experiences ("Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," "AIDS Series"), but we also get formal experiments like an idiosyncratic erasure poem based entirely on phrases Sylvia Plath underlined in her copy of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night.
Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Sharon Tate appear, as does Dick Fisk (a gay porn star); steering by those stars, we know we are in queer baby boomer male waters, but there are more than enough surprises to keep things interesting. Had James Schuyler been born thirty years later than he actually was, he might have written not unlike Trinidad.
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