Jennifer K. Sweeney's "How to Live on Bread and Music"
Just finished reading Jennifer K. Sweeney's How to Live on Bread and Music , this year's winner of the James Laughlin Award for a second book of poems. The poems about siblings, in the first section, are not memorable in either image or music. The long poem "The Listeners" that makes up section two stretches a tolerable idea to intolerable length. One of its parts is about back-masking, a common enough subject rendered in a prosaic idiom: The music teacher told her third graders if you played "Strawberry Fields Forever" backwards it would sing John is dead. The children imagined her hand steering the record counterclockwise like witchcraft revealing the secret warped message. After five dead lines, the witchcraft simile sticks out like a fragment of a thumb. "Revealing the secret warped message" is a bathetic and redundant conclusion to the sentence. Sweeney continues by describing "scratchy" school movies: After the credits rol...