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Cole Swensen's brilliant, witty riff on the
history and meaning of opera as art form represents and refigures
high passion and baroque exultation in the most minimal, condensed,
and quiet of vocabularies and phrasal units. Oh is opera cool-the
aria transformed into delicate echo—
thus witless
this edgeless—
and it is precisely this restraint-this subtle aural and verbal
spin on opera as extravagant art-that allows the reader to revel
in the difference-as well as the continuity—of our own poetic
moment.
—Marjorie Perloff
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