The Nineteenth Century and Other Poems

Poetry. What attracts one first to Chris Glomski’s poetry is its intricacy, that sense of hidden meanings and cryptic revelation shimmering in ‘its secret / curving rescissions / and negative spaces.’ Soon afterwards, one comes to understand that he is not merely a sphinx wrapped in Chicago enigma, but that, if one attends to these poems, to the structures they embody, the guy has some actual wisdom to impart, the lean mean kind that probably felt just as good to Melville and Poe as it does today. I’ve often wondered why poets don’t work more often with the compressed energies of steampunk. Certainly they work beautifully in this case, suffusing the book with a low, musical hum while whirling like modernist machines with all sorts of visual, sensory, and historical simultaneities. Plus he is funny. Plus he is amazing–Kevin Killian.