Svenvold-M: Soul Data

"Soul Data is rarely compounded--of wit and music, surface elegance and intellectual depth, quirk and quandary. Its sensual intelligence is on high alert, and the sheer unsheerness of its language--all its densities and textures--is a linguiphiliacal delight. Unmistakeably American (the poetry's occasions and its cadences alike serve for signature) it has the jinx-meister's humors about it. There's a dark streak, too, an eye for the natural indifferences that border the spotlit human heats. A fine rhetorical savvy, in a mind inclined to the chillier depths: among poetic gifts these days it's an uncommon conjunction, a gift of mysteries, like the sight (across a night pond's surface) of bright-blue shooting star: one hopes the other humans get to see it."--Heather McHugh

V Linoleum]

South of Spokane Street, a gear works

turns its teeth--shadows in a cavern,

through the cycles of a drop-forge piston,

heft themselves and recoil in a dark

rain of sparks, the echo off the blocks--

pa-tang --arriving late, repeats itself again,

a ceaseless, a remorseless hammering home,

a point made and lost in the patterns of work.

Across the street, a hunkered stretch of houses,

swing sets and cyclone fencing, a clatch of cars.

The agent shrugs--"It's zoned Residential/

Light Industrial"--pa-tong A lunatic fringe

of gladiolus fronts the walkways and the rows

of empty rooms we roll by at low idle.