Past Lives

<p class=ql-align-justify>In <em>Past Lives</em> each line leaps to the next in glorious unpredictability forming a latticework of surprise. In the world of V. Joshua Adams we have competitive knitting beer commercials cabriolets and mandolin players breaking ukulele players' fingers. To employ a Pavement title Adams's poems are slanted and enchanted: their surrealist strangeness is sometimes meditative and sometimes mercurial with acrobatic associative jumps. These are poems of wit inquiry and sonic vigor that examine issues of being textuality and the imaginative act. <em>Past Lives</em> is swift-winged and sharp and darkly bright as its sentences spin with wryness: Even the language of ruin gets run-down The question filled me with dread / which was better than nothing and the following excerpt from which the title <em>Past Lives</em> arises: A lot of people have past lives they are covering up. / For example I was once an Episcopalian. Though Adams's poems aren't overtly emotional he extends his antennae into a range of consciousness including desire and darkness; or to use a phrase from Mark Doty they are a logarithm of decay and rekindling. </p><p class=ql-align-justify> </p><p class=ql-align-justify><em>-Simone Muench</em></p><p class=ql-align-justify> </p><p><br></p>