[Jim Moonan]

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Rick, What a rollick! It certainly lives up to its goal to revive an atrophied imagination.

Some thoughts... I sense a plastic wasteland. It alludes to a wide swath of literary rambles from Eliot to Ginsberg to Lennon and I imagine many more. What it is driving at as yet eludes my understanding, though the humor and pathos of it is clear. The rhyming seems to never stop if I give it some slack. There are some wonderful, unexpected juxtapositions of imagery such as the gondolier in the hot-air balloon. There are lines, too, that are epigraph-worthy, like "Tomorrow is a glass on yesterday / where nothing happens” and, "Impervious to all the moon can sorrow". It all adds up to a feast — a crown of beef-poetry.

The whole of It feels tight, packed-in, in a good way. In some ways it reminds me of Hunke in the way it is locked in without anything extraneous to divert or distract. It keeps driving forward toward a point — what that point is or even if there is a point, I don’t know. I’ll come back, though, I’m sure.

If it weren’t for Joe's glowing review I might not have taken the time to slowly read and savor the phrasing that is so succinctly obscure, even cataclysmic, in spots, humorous in others, and in some spots darkly beautiful.

I know my crit is not much of a deep-end crit. but for now I have only admiration. Retirement should be this productive.

Btw, there are also sumptuous sonics throughout, like this one: chiral molecule

I don’t know much about crowns (I think Mary Meriam posted one once but don’t hold me to that. I enjoy the size of it once I gave it a chance, though to read a less skilled one would be torture. What I like best about the form is the most obvious: the repeating of the last line in each stanza to be the first line in the next. There’s a symmetry to that that keeps me going. Also, I like the thought of a poem being a crown. Even if it’s a crown of beef — ha!

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