Macular Hole

Wagner's poems proclaim, among other things, a finitude--"I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake"--that is anything but final, that is instead embodied and generative. From the completion of the human body arise the actions of the human mind; it is these that Wagner charts, with affection, detachment, a measured embarrassment, and a calculated grossness, in defiance of all recommendation. That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perception, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; domestic arrangement, satisfactory and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical: Its subjects range from the controlled experiment of selfhood to the blooming and pruning of personal dynamics on a road-trip to " . . . God and country / given up and given." In this, Catherine Wagner's second book, we spy a poet espousing, somewhat fearful of her mandate and putting that fear to good use in the service of real exchange.