Glass Enclosure

Following the tenacious imagination through all its methods and obsessions, this brilliant new collection by a poet who is also a critic of jazz form and free-verse prosody speaks to the very core of all lyric concerns. Charles O. Hartman's poems are cool and dizzying, a dark, witty fusion of jazz sensibility and computer-generated texts. The title poem, dedicated to the late Bud Powell, interleaves an extended monologue with blocked prose, sonnets, and lyrics. In the center of the book, free verse and metrical forms ravel and unravel in a moving exploration of the spoken word. The final long poem is a meditative satire on computers, colonialism, and the pressures of history. With innovative grace, Glass Enclosure confronts our very systems of understanding, the languages that enclose us even as they reveal the world.