In this collection of poetry, Charles Noble further reins in an already tight form-haiku-only to let loose a "logopoeic" poetry. He presents poems of extraordinary rigour and riddles of wit that are solved by "lifetime" insights-a dialectical poetry that still observes a phenomenological toehold but transcends the limits of locality in recognizing the curled--up--but--everywhere world of media and markets-la Fredric Jameson. And yet, these "haikus" go straight-to "the shock of the naive." They turn to a middle ground, in Aristotle's sense of difficult target. They point to human acts, human reactions, and enact, themselves, a meta-linguistic wrestling, at one with the quarreling couple in the bar hanging on each other's words and insistent with "What do you mean by [a simple word]?" But they are also implicated in what he calls the death drive (not death wish), which arcs freely over a human life span-think architecture-and which, more radically, in the "pleated/ crossword," "make[s]/ good// a/ bit/ of/ bad/ infinity," no expenses, save for that toehold, earth, as he would have it.
