Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant and Slide Trombone by Rachel Trousdale

Rachel Trousdale’s Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone is a charming and somewhat eclectic first collection that showcases a new poet’s considerable talent. Trousdale’s deep engagement with language is apparent throughout: an enormous range of rich diction, and astonishing syntactical verve are qualities that set her apart from many of her generation. The poems reveal, as well, her interest in the mind at work, as she puts her discerning, literature-infused intelligence to work, psychologically plumbing the nether regions of everyday situations and encounters in pursuit of new understandings, both intellectual and emotional.

—Kate Daniels, author of A Walk in Victoria’s Secret

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

The sadness of jokes and the jokes that emerge from sadness; the shape of a careful life and the life of a carefully shaped concrete poem; the constrictions of a funereal villanelle and the wildness of an Egyptian immortal’s cosmic, dreamlike funeral; the carefully plotted “sequence of cause and effect” and the bewildering persistence of everything you thought you forgot from childhood– that’s what you’ll find in this “preposterous/ gleeful giddy” (and, also, often, serious, disillusioned, and wise) collection, the first of more to come from a poet who understands both how much the real world has to offer, and what to say when that world lets us down.

—Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls With Nonsense and Belmont

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]