Playfully invading the conventional territories of poetry, Sally Van Doren throws into query shape, material, and the sound and that means of phrases. The poems in intercourse at midday Taxes combine trouble-free narrative, midwestern vernacular, and linguistic ambivalence, embedded during which is a fight among the brain and the physique. whereas one poem admonishes the reader to "Forget the phonics / of the focal/fecal. word, / style, and effuse," in one other the speaker says, "I refine my experience of / discomfort if you contact me / with anything blue." A preoccupation with the visible, artists, and art seeps via a lot of those imagistic minitexts. those poems search for unencumber in descriptions of actual acts and in elaborate manipulations of language. occasionally they locate it: "Along comes the sentence to / get a divorce the monotony of possession." extra usually, even though, the questions they pose withstand solutions: "What extravagant / commodity is sex?" and "Which el- / lipsis omits love?" Gender id blurs because the poems probe theories of articulation and examine the geographies of language and love. via wordplay and notice paintings, those poems commute a tightly crafted sphere of feelings and ideas.

"Preposition"

The ahead of took us correct up tothe after, although undermeant we should always now not attempt over,from being more desirable than to,

up shying from its ascentin the face of down. I heldon to you and beside youI turned with and about.

In our round, the near/farcould draw back and toward,within the with out. by way of my aboveand your lower than, the wheres and

whens retreated, leaving timeand house stranded, in off, on out.