The Alphabet of Desire

Hamby's poems are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive. She roars around the parabola of the time-space continuum, leaping between the past, both ancient and within memory, and the present, then circles the globe all within a single high-octane couplet. Hamby strings words and worlds together with the gravity-defying momentum of a high-flying dancer or a whirling dervish, traveling to Italy, India, St. Louis, the Amazon, Sante Fe, and Hawaii in long zestful exhalations. She rumbas and stomps and shakes her finger in your face as she writes of war and sex, love and hunger, insomnia, drunkenness, the movies, family, the soul, art, and the devil. Her commentary is hilarious. The sudden moments of stillness found unexpectedly within the rush of her rants are radiant and spellbinding, and the clash between her velocity and her specificity creates a sizzling current of electricity that runs through every dashing, piquant, and diva-sung line.--Donna Seaman, BooklistIn this sublime and imposing book of poetry, Barbara Hamby races through the circuitous regions of Heaven and Hell, desire and love, giving shape and significance to the strange and the familiar. Her book ignites with a proclamation, "In the beginning was the word, fanning out into syllables, like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas, lovely leafy parts fluttering into atoms and cells, genus and phylum, nouns and verbs;" an easy metaphor for her intoxicating linguistic machinations.Hamby's roaming, inquisitive mind reels in the reader, "I'm persuaded the day will come when I'll lie static as a falcon in a hunter's sack, fragments of iron studding my reckless breast." Not limited to the self-referential, Hamby playfully references historic and literary personae, taking stabs at Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bible and Casanova. "Who wouldn't," she challenges us, "give anything for the voice of an angel and wings to fly above the rough dirt of birth?"