Bad Alchemy

In this exuberant and distinctive collection, Dionisio Martinez addresses topics as diverse as love, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, twentieth-century art and music, and the relevance of language in an age of image. Much of Martinez's private iconography comes from the picket-fence California community of his youth, in which large events-from the veneration of pop icons (Jean Harlow, Ed Sullivan) to the Vietnam War-seemed to move in slow motion. As an adult, the poet tries to make sense of what the child could not grasp.