"No computer was used in the creation and submission of these poems," says Albert Goldbarth of his latest collection, and it's a splendid irony that a poet with such a mechanistic picture of the cosmos should not avail himself of gadgetry in writing about it. By typewriter or legal pad, evidently, Goldbarth's one-squillionth scale model of the universe proceeds apace. The poet's distinctive voice is right where he left it—voluble, non-negative, and eager—and he shares with certain American scientists the unquestioned belief that astonishment and wonder can be recreated by the expression of astonishment and wonder. The poems are right where he left them, too, playing six-degrees-of-separation with the most far-out concepts he can make drift through his imagination: Lucretius to seti to Eskimos in fourteen lines; a Neolithic corpse in the Tyrol to McDonald's in thirteen; a metropolis to a sesame seed in one. A typo in a catalogue ("This non-aerosol prayer dates from the forties") or a conversational slip-up ("I will perish this forever") can get him going for pages. A foreign grad student shows him the sentence "Some days I hated my coworker" and asks him what it means to ork a cow; this makes his day. The poems have titles like "'You Might Notice Blood in Your Urine for a Couple of Weeks'/& Scenes from the American Revolution." It is as though he writes for the tabloids in Gotham City, throwing at us, for our adolescent delectation, "Mutant-engineered bloodsucker djinns, invisibility rays,/lost civilizations, past-life telepathic romance," with great gusto for the camp.

Goldbarth's work amounts to a poetry of lists, and, as some have pointed out, such a poetry has trouble outdoing itself, must inflate to retain a dynamic, and is ultimately flattening to the things it is trying to exalt. There can't be any meaning in the connections the poems draw when it is practically a premise that connections can be drawn between anything. Like fireworks ("lollapalooza kaboom," he goes, "zowie"), Goldbarth is dazzling and without threat. His hyperstimulated tumbling through tides of garbage continues, and his intensity shows no signs of letting up, but there isn't much room left for it to matter. He seems to recognize that he is becoming an act (he quotes from reviews of his own books) and wishes to press a claim of greater significance, hoping we might hear through his poetry that "the music at the quarky heart of things is elegiac." If I hear it right, it sounds more like a polka.

— D. H. Tracy