PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

Michele Glazer's On Tact, and the Made Up World is outstanding. These are poems executed with live-wire exactitude; even where one cannot have certainty, Glazer presents her reader with the option that absence is certain enough. And there are absences. "Holes" appear frequently throughout these poems — holes of vision, tunnels that worm out past the point of visibility, forcing the eye to doubt what could constitute the "made up world," from the blown-glass flowers of Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka to the "girl in pink moving from lap to lap to lap." Hole, deriving from 'hol' (Old English), means hollow. Interesting then, that whole derives from 'hool,' meaning healthy, unhurt. One less "o," that perfect shape of hole-ness, and we are left in the cavity of something less complete. It is in this sunken grade that these poems reside, not without a keen and spirited awareness, not without a complex appreciation for the broken thing. "Name everything that can break," Glazer says, and we can't; it's too much.