Wanton

In the first section of Angela Hibbs's second collection, short lyrical poems blur the lines between personal, geographical, and artistic spaces, demonstrating how we blend the intimate details of our lives with the culture we consume be it modern literature, primetime television, or contemporary art. Here, liminal spaces are not denounced as confusing gray areas, but celebrated as welcome places of pause, ripe with opportunity for fertile mutation. The second section of the book, a long poem sequence set in the imaginary town of Wanton, is concerned with familial legitimacy from the point of view of adopted children put to work to earn their keep. Absentee fathers and overly-present benefactors haunt the long narrative poem, and the result is something like the bastard child of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie and Harmony Korine's Gummo. At once sweetly comic and brutally grim, it always manages to assert its oddball characters and misfit emotions with vulnerability and verve.