>2: An Anthology of New Collaborative Poetry
Sugar Mule Press

I’m actually in this attractive, 222 page book, with a great cover featuring a visual poem by Kathy Ernst and the wonderful Sheila E. Murphy, an editor of this opus. I have to say that I’m very happy to have a collaborative sequence I wrote with wordsmith Alan Halsey included, and to find myself a part of a constellation of envelope-pushing post-post-post modernists. There is indeed some good (or if not good, at least mind-stretching) writing from everyone here, except for a sequence of gauche sonnets by Jennifer Hill-Kaucher that Dan Waber gamely rescues from banality with his racy decostructions of the form. I guess my real problem with this anthology, however, is in its over-generosity to four people: John M. Bennett, Jim Leftwich, Geof Huth, and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen. They appear in various combinations a grand total of 20 times with about 61 pages given over to them (not counting biographical statements). If they managed to present us with totally different virtuosic styles of “poeming,” this over-representation would be at the very least instructive, but it seems that these four are intent on constantly disproving the old adage that two heads are better than one. One text written solely by John M. Bennett seems about the same when written by John M. Bennett and Geof Huth (maugre the “correction” by Bob Grumman). A text by Bob Brueckl and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen seems not to differ a hair from Jim Leftwich and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, except in line spaces and type-faces. One or two examples of these writers would have allowed readers an adequate representation of their talents and would have opened the way for a wider selection of collaborations from vital writers who are not included here, but should be. Perhaps a public “come-all-ye” on the Buffalo Poetics List by editors Murphy and Weber would have resulted in more variety of names and styles and upped the interest of this anthology. At the very least, I hope Bennett, Huth, Leftwich and Kervinen have done their best to buy lots and lots of copies to help support the generosity of the editors and publisher.