Author(s): Cassandra L. Atherton

Poetry

'"Exhumed" opens with an epigraph from DG Rossetti: a letter in which he describes recovering the book of poems that he interred with his wife. Atherton's intertexts (interred texts) work in that register of death, love and betrayal. Much of the power of these prose poems comes from their complexity of tone. If the speaker of these poems is characterised by desire - alike for love, glamour, sex, food, consumer goods and a life as real as it seems in fiction - still the poems work to place this voice at a distance. Sensuous and emotionally charged though they are, their effect is often satiric. Atherton's intertexts work not like an echo chamber so much as a three-sided mirror placed in a mirrored box, creating depth by reflections, distortions, strange juxtapositions and an interplay of surfaces. Exhumed is lush, canny, fast-paced and alive with wit'--author's website.