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.