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Mirrors for Gold is about desire and thedistances traveled between things. It is abook of ghosts, rhythm, “cadences becoming,”and stillnesses undressing. It is abook of stories, the brilliance of bodiestouching, and bodies resisting their ownfrailties.This is a work about the body: human bodies;mutated bodies; a city body; bodies thatmake up voluptuous landscapes. Landscapeswhere horror and the erotic intermingle. It isa book that puts on display the historicity ofthese bodies within the succor of flesh meldinginto flesh, sidewalks, and sometimes,ritual, orgasmic crucifixions. They occupyplaces that are worn and frayed at the edges.There are thresholds “In which anger andbleeding are eroticized” (38). There aresilences and slips of paper. Flesh. Blood andcorpse. Appetites.The “haunting human detritus” are objectsthat have lost themselves in the stupor ofcities, sex, fringe, and simulacra. This is apoetry of interiors and of forbidden spaces:“We assembled to regard each other’s erectionsin the steam bath / without touching”(37) or “You dreamt your mother, quote /” (28).Mirrors for Gold produces a type of restlessnessin the reader. With end lines that leaveone hanging with longing and poems openendedwith possibility, one wonders if therewill ever be a way out or a way around one’sown mortality and loneliness even withinthe physicality of “crepuscular desire.”Tejada elucidates this sure fate with lines like“while the water of bodies / in the earthevaporated” or “as though in fact self weredetermined below the surface where loomedthe terrifying vision of a world devoid ofthem, the others” (39).Tejada also illuminates language rife withits own frailties and complexities: “wefucked until / at last of / increasingly /more obdurate / matter as though two /languages were / scarcely enough” (43) and“her screams another language all together”(58) or “the speechless power of poetryexposed to air / as opposed to water, relinquished/ listener between the line eachbreath / to detonate the eldritch” (65).Mirrors for Gold is an offering, kindling to itsown hot ignitions. Tejada weaves the nakednessof debilitated landscapes, bodies, language,and our own reflected desires andfears into a sensually rich, edible work.Christine Lark Fox has recently returned from NewMexico where she became reacquainted with awe.She has a deep devotion to both love and magic.micah ballardparish krewesbootstrap productions / 2008Review by Greg FuchsIt is impossible to read Micah Ballard’s ParishKrewes without Hurricane Katrina imposingits harrowing aura, replete with tragic imagesof deluged New Orleanians, abandoned bymuddled civic leaders and left to effectivelydie by drowning or deprivation.Ballard’s poems are clearly located inLouisiana, though they often travel to farawaylocales like the Queens MidtownTunnel or the Tollund and Grauballe bogsof Denmark. The title Parish Krewes succinctlysignifies the unique, almost non-American, culture of Louisiana. It's a statewhere its counties are known as parishesand the carnival organizations that makeMardi Gras the biggest free party on earthare known as krewes, an antebellum embellishmentof the word crew that has lodgeditself into the local vernacular. ThomDonovon eloquently described, in his exegesisof Brett Evans’ and Frank Sherlock’sincendiary Ready to Eat Individual, thatHurricane Katrina has ripped time a newera, A.K., After Katrina (The Poetry ProjectNewsletter #217). As the horrors of the Warto End All Wars defined a generation ofavant-garde artists who indelibly influenced20th-Century art and writing, so have thehorrible truths revealed in the ebb ofHurricane Katrina and its attendant flood.Scores of artists in every medium—littleknownpoets to installation artists to provocativerappers to flamboyant pop stars toserious filmmakers to soulful trumpeters—BOOK REVIEWSsee rangers for hoursSUBSCRIBE1 Year — $17 / 2 Years — $30www.fenceportal.orgfebruary/march 2009 25