Loose Sugar

<P>Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised — love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar — are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold, but into a poet''s philosopher''s stone, in which language marries life. </P><P>Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual heading (such as "space / time" or "time / work") in which the terms are neither in collision nor collusion, but in conversation. It''s elemental sweet talk, and is Brenda Hillman''s most experimental work to date, culminating in a meditation on the possibility of a native — and feminine — language.</P>