See You in the Dark

An acclaimed novelist, essayist, memoirist, and translator, Lynne Sharon Schwartz has written that she began writing "before [she] knew about the strictures of literary genres: poem, story, essay." What she wrote as a child was "poetic speculation . . . partaking of all the genres and bounded by none." It is not surprising, then, that her facility with, and love of, language and speculation are on display in her new collection of poetry, See You in the Dark. Despite her indifference to genre, Schwartz takes a profound delight in poetic forms, appropriating the sonnet, the prose poem, and the envoi. She brings an easygoing musicality to her work, which ranges from parodic translations of Verlaine to instructions for making the perfect soup to a meditation on an Ecstasy trip. No artificial line between high and low culture divides Schwartz's world: she is equally intrigued by the metaphor of gardening, the work of artist Jenny Holzer, the bandits Frank and Jesse James (maybe distant relatives of Henry and William?), and the unintentional poetry of Craigslist's "missed connection" section. Filled with wisdom, humor, and deep insight, See You in the Dark is poetry for readers not bounded by genre.