Rebecca Wolff

Slight Return Rebecca Wolff

In her new collection, influential publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages on bare and tender feet over the rocky mess of American hypercapitalism--including consumerism, gentrification, and branding--emerging and re-emerging far from the land of neat rhetorical solutions.

Labyrinthine in their paradoxes but incisive in their witty recriminations, these poems grapple with the hubris and dysmorphia of a soul forged in the pale fire of neoliberalism. Wolff is poet-as-querent, not only of cards and sages ("I only hang out with people who are psychic / anything else is a / waste of precious continuity") but of language itself: "hooray gave me the strength / to understand a poem no problem / formal gift from language diode, diadem, overgloss, subslime. That's not a typo that's an / egregious coinage minted in a prideful cataract." These journeys from personal and social despair are infinite and recursive--moving keenly toward the point of diminished return and demurring on promises of safe arrival.