Eric Wertheimer

Mylar Eric Wertheimer

Poetry. MYLAR bears the grace and stringent inquisitiveness of Elizabeth Bishop's North & South and Marianne Moore's Observations. Wertheimer gives us a world as delicately confounded as the persons who live in it. The lucidity with which MYLAR documents vicissitudes of weathering ('The world leaked and was confused / And large knowing birds / Came to rescue its unnerving nestedness') is matched by a lyric voice whose meticulous fortitude assuages just enough. We are enough consoled by Wertheimer's elegant intelligence to continue searching for what in distress we might otherwise overlook, 'a burned femur buried safe / in an old velvet bag.' It's nearly too easy, in the manner of mylar balloons, to say these poems teach us new relations to gravity and occasion. More than this, MYLAR's tensile lines instruct in the ligatures between the earth beneath out feet and a differently unsteady horizon beyond reaching. As gifted a poet as he is a scholar, Wertheimer understands the volatility of Emersonian transcendence, the equivocal auspiciousness of 'see there, it's you too, // there's some thing in you. Such lines succinctly speak to the dangers and gifts of this idiosyncratic, quietly brilliant work.--Michael Snediker

'Where we live, we live in cars, ' Eric Wertheimer writes in MYLAR, of an eerily postmodern city where 'Dust storm at the mirror of stars.' Wertheimer locates us in an at-times gorgeously realized lyric moment--a perfectly rhymed couplet, for instance, or the sly grammatique of this deftly languaged poetry. The visionary range of Wertheimer's poetic dictions across centuries is riveting, and the swerve to tender, embodied attentiveness and vulnerability so moving. MYLAR is miracle.--Cynthia Hogue