Villanueva ends her short review with:
Intellectually fearsome and restlessly exploratory, “little catastrophes with the calmness of a cloudy/ dawn observed …” the poems in Sonnets require rigorous attention. Their delights are in sound and paradox, and in the discovery of a poetic imagination that conjures “mute mountains” and “precise iridescence,” “airless balloons” and “quivering ideas.”
Throughout the collection, references to water change temperature, shift to repeated references to snow, sprinkled throughout. For an American poet published by a British press and living in Canada, there are plenty of references to snow in poems rife with Canadian/British spellings. She puts the “u” in “neighbour.” Hello, neighbour. Is this a book that begins in New Orleans and leaves the sea behind for snowy Toronto? It’s as though the poems suggest various possibilities, almost taunting the reader; they don’t want you to know. She collects her lines and information, and, through cut-up and collage, lets them fall where they might, or may, creating sonnets. Early in the collection, she writes, in part four of “tellurium candies”:
plotting unawares the direction of impulse
(which is to say, not plotting at all.)
As if the poems understand that knowing is beside the point, that knowing is to miss the point entirely. Perhaps the point is simply how the words flow. Listen.
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