Perfect Crime

Perfect Crime is a haunted book. In it one feels a pas de deux of despair and obliquity, of image and abstraction. A wry, humorous darkness broods over the pages. Greek myths that thread through the book--Demeter, Andromache, Chronos, Kore, Echo, Hermes and the gang--imply a larger pattern of doom for humans--humans who have "expiration dates" and are usually crushed in their passionate contacts with gods. In the face of such doom, the human exercise of consciousness, through language, is a brave defiance, that these poems act out in page after page. Perfect Crime feels like one long poem, a "highway / with no exit ramps" and "no exits," coherent in tone and method. - Rosanna Warren