Neither World (Miami University Press Poetry Series)

Poetry. "Ralph Angel makes visible the liminal: those almost unbearable states that hover near the threshold of perception. This is a poetics of trace and trance, accident and significance, rightly odd details, and speakers who are 'electrified / by earth shoes, a solitary goat dance, / the weird expanse of parking lots, / glittering, peopled with loneliness.' Angel combines the drop-dead nonchalance of film noir, the cool jazz of Chet Baker, and epiphanies of demise when he writes 'it takes / practice to get lost, paint with our own hair, burrow deeply / into shadows of flesh coming undone at the seams.' He eavesdrops on the American psyche and retrieves the somatic residue of speech within the dream-defiled paradise that is Southern California. In the absence of satiation, he makes a haven of longing. I am intoxicated by the fine strangeness of his work"--Alice Fulton.