Some Alphabets

<p>It's in the gnarled wonders of its diction that John Latta's poetry has its most immediate charm. The 130 poems of <em>Some Alphabets</em> fizz between levels of diction-the demotic the formal the high theoretical the archaic the futuristic the expansive the pinched the ordinary and the just plain weird-so that every sixteen-line stanza becomes a foray into the delightful unexpected.</p><p>Latta has always had a way with words a kind of weighty insouciance everywhere evident in Rubbing Torsos and Breeze his previous collections: the ability to spin out simultaneously concrete sensual observation off-handed bon mot and penetrating insight. <em>Some Alphabets</em> focuses that linguistic multi-tasking to an abbreviated impacted pitch and stirs into the mix a dark and glittering compost of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century language. . . . Stubbled profligate I / Paw th'ancients who paw me.</p><p>-Mark Scroggins from the Introduction</p><p></p>