Ah well, I confess to being prejudiced against this one from the start because the picture painted of the row of indoor stationary runners listening to their headphones is one I have witnessed while walking outdoors by the dozens of corporate gyms that have sprouted up all over Manhattan, a picture I see framed and contained again and again by those giant plate-glass windows, a fish-tank portrait of plastic health which I can't help but wish the poem were more savagely critical of. My failing, I suppose, but the poem seems too generous. The reverie, when it kicks in in the sestet, would be a chance to redeem the poem for me, to give it some bite--but instead all I get is the generically romantic 'girl in France' which I find utterly limp as an image. The finale of traveling nowhere fast while succinct and apt (and a good use of cliche, as opposed to that silly French girl) is too little too late for me.
Nothing wrong with the execution, of course. This is merely a personal quibble about content. Yet such quibbles, idiosyncratic as they may be, are what usher in or bar entry to the individual souls of individual readers. So while I don't dislike this, I can't get too excited about it either.
Nemo
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