From Publishers Weekly
This overlong volume, conceived as a single poem, is an elaborate exercise in self-indulgence. Waldman ( Skin Meat Bones ) justifies the rambling and, for the most part, incoherent work with a simplification of feminist theory: "I want to don armor of words as they do and fight with liberated tongue & punctured heart. But unlike the men's, my history & myths are personal ones." This leads to a hermetic text that eludes meaning for a reader who is not hooked into the poet's circle of friends. The book jumps from juvenile jokes, presumably attributable to the voice of the poet's son ("you're a cracked people / You're a craggy rock cliff / You're Michael Jackson you're Jacky Frosty . . ."), to pretentious refrains ("I RISE BEFORE ISHTAR IN THE EAST . . ."). Those passages in which the meaning is clear offer up banal narrative: "I lie back & take him in. He wounds me after a fashion." The work is patched together with letters, lists and narrow columns of words, but her collage lacks the charm and happy accidents of true randomness, and the language falls short of the purity that makes minimalism interesting.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
An "open system" epic consisting of 23 "self-organizing" sections, Iovis ("All is full of Jove") attempts to fuse numerous "leitmotifs": dreams and out-of-body experiences; fathers and sons (Waldman's father fought in World War II, and she studies religion with her son in Bali); gurus (John Cage, Jack Kerouac, and the Dalai Lama); men, or "seed syllables" ("the male gods take over as electricity and dynamite"); women ("I covered myself with the black silk chador better/ to hide this pulsating body of desire"); political concerns (arms control and human rights); shape-shifting and voices ("What is this identification with young men? Are they playful tricksters inside the hag?"); travel (she is almost killed by a terrorist attack in Rome); and opaque occult and heavy-metal imagery (she once "nibbled" psychotropic drugs). This ambitious attempt by our most exuberant performance poet to write a New Age "cohesive landscape" provides many pleasures but little contentment. It would be best heard aloud.
- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., InstituteCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
