The Millennium Hotel: The Rider Quintet, vol. 2 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

In this captivating sequel to his award-winning Rider, Mark Rudman reclaims a sacred space for poetry. The Millennium Hotel is a world of dazzling imitations, a vast casino where personal narrative is recognized as a fiction and death always holds the winning hand. Rudman asks, "How not to be seduced by the new?" as he illustrates the intimate ways in which facade, gender, and memory inform both our private and public realms.

Here the interlocutor's voice shifts and freely crosses gender lines, especially in poems about early erotic experience. Mothers, daughters, lovers, and wives are passionately engaged. Its inclusiveness and wide range of tonal registers enable The Millennium Hotel to blend seamlessly the intimate, the social, the comic, and the apocalyptic. The book moves like a series of sonatas, melding childhood, the diaspora, and eros.