Vertical Elegies 5

Imagine moving at the speed of thought through a sense-engulfing place-a city street, carnival, airport lobby . . . or your life. You have no time to process these sounds, sights, smells, and other psycho-sensory bulges-but no way either to keep them from flooding the inner world you're forever on the verge of sorting out. That, in part, is the experience of reading these sixty-nine sonnets, each of them a multidimensional, kaleidoscopic crossroad where organic form, awareness, memory/history, intellect, and the human heart merge into specificity, like light at the end of a tunnel. The Boston Review has said this of Truitt's poetry: "Cunning formal maneuverings provide the distance and displacement needed to rattle the teeth of syntax and alter the current beat. As a reader, one gets caught up in the frenzy. There is the pleasure of verbal abandon and the reassurance of visual control. There is the perpetually keyed-up anticipation of anything-could-happen-here." And it does.