Jackknife

In Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, Beatty travels the turns and collisions of over twenty years of work. She moves from first-person narratives to poems that straddle the page in fragments, to lines that sprawl with long lines of train tracks. Always landing in meaning, we are inside the body-not in a confessional voice, not autobiography-but arriving through the expanded, exploded image of many stories and genders.The new poems leap imagistically from the known world to the purely imagined, as in the voice in "e;Abortion with Gun Barrel"e;: "e;I am the counselor,/there are cracks in the barrel of the gun/there is aiming/shots of sorrow-/ shots of light."e; Commitment to a rabid feminist voice continues, but arrival has a new ring to it, with beginnings rescripted: "e;I am a bastard./I walk around in this body of mine."e;Beatty's fascination with the highway and the breakout West jackknifes at the crossroads of the brutal and the white plains of loss-the body torn down and resurrected in the twenty first century.