The Cellar Dreamer

Poetry. "Valerie Coulton's exciting new collection presents three distinct projects: compact songlike poems relating to Oz mythology, uncanny prose improvisations, and the serial poem "blaue augen." Nietzsche wrote of a cultural "pathos of distance." Coulton locates an erotics of distance in which "facets," "opening," and "appetite" circulate without quite touching. The author's worlds are all the more real by laying bare their fictive element. In this collection, one seems always to stand within the action rather than from a proscenium reading position. It is beauty's finest point of view"--Paul Hoover.