Escape Velocity

"Escape Velocity" is a polyrhythmic and polyphonic "tour-de-force" that engages both with the constructed and the constructor: with buildings and architects, with music and musicians, policy and politics, the personal and the political, the dancer and the dance. Attacking his subject matter with fierce precision, confronting the world on the same tough terms as an investigative journalist would, Breskin traverses the globe in search of the conjunctions and elisions that reveal the world. His poems go into all the darkened interstitial spaces, and crack them and lever them wide apart: scary, open, free. "Welfare Reform" is about just that, as a monologue spoken from one very poor to one very rich, referencing North Korea, African tribal warfare, the holocaust, mortgages, ecstasy, Native Americans, tennis and dancing along the way; "Ugly Beauty" takes a Monk song title and goes at contemporary Social Darwinism by way of Cheney, Bush, "The Bell Curve" controversy, and Cindy Crawford's mole; "Newsworthy" looks at how our society commodifies "tragedy" to bolster the emotions of innocent spectators (with a special snippet reserved for Plath's ex-); and"Due Process" examines a schoolyard shooting from the POV of a mother who's lost her only child.