Reviews

Springsteen, Sartre, King Solomon, and voles; Beetle Bailey and Blake; Kafka, Mayakovsky, and Manet; Veronica Lake, armadillos, and Utrillo-all and more are Bill Yarrow's bluff companions in The Vig of Love. From the unsettling insight of "Rattlesnake Pancakes" to waggish puns like "There's a succor born every minute" to the serpentine images of "Andalusia," The Vig takes its readers on a rollicking, Marxist journey (Groucho Marx, that is!), one that is brainy, ironic, irreverent, gnomic, slapstick, satiric, anarchic, sage, and humane. Whether speaking "of sad bullseyes that long for darts" or observing that "your heart gets pregnant and gives birth" to a future "made entirely of your past," The Vig of Love is an elegant gavotte of phrase and form, a book in which each poem finds its perfect mode of expression. -Ralph Hamilton, author of Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail, editor of RHINO