Sunday, June 17, 2007

Knott on Knox. Kneato.


"Jennifer L. Knox's first book A Gringo Like Me is a rarity in that it is almost as good as the blurbs on its back say it is, and her second book is even better.

"Knox is a tragic poet, though her poems at times seem comic. Very USA in other words. Filled with the despair of our 'fallen names' finding poignant resolutions where none exist.

"The characters in Drunk by Noon are sad spasms desperate for the entertainment promised by the photographs of empty American landscapes, and finding it after all only in each other. For which Knox has the heart to forgive them. Knox has a sympathetic eye for the caricatures and celebrations we USAers use to evade the cultural horror she depicts with complicity as if she too were not entirely innocent of it.

"Her poems typify and experience our angst hypes, our hopeless flippancies. She braves to save whom, herself or us."

--BILL KNOTT