The New York Postcard Sonnets

With an urban anthropologist's sense of the rich hodgepodge that constitutes a culture, and a pilgrim's sense of discovery and wonderment, Philip Dacey delivers his New York City to us in this enormously appealing series of sonnets he calls postcards. As ever, he demonstrates how form can harness the inchoate, discipline the disparate. Dacey collects the city's language, he limns its neighborhoods, and he does so with wit and elan. If eros can be thought of as life-fulness, these poems are erotic. Stephen Dunn