Paris Views

Poetry. Anyone who loves Paris will find that literarily-overdetermined city brought to new life--new and not particularly literary, for through Joyce's sharp, quick, and cleverly amorous eye, Paris is evoked not as objet d'art, but as sloppily, raucously, lived; as an idiosyncratic confluence of specific instances that shed deep light on the way that individual perception and experience sculpt public space. Throughout, he makes the most of a delightful and visceral head-on collision of languages to construct a space between all utterance that is raw and always reaching out for its word--which, though not yet arrived, can be felt coming into being through that collision itself.--Cole Swensen