Sally van Doren's "Sex at Noon Taxes"
These are poems about the female body, sex, and sexual politics. They try to be playful and deep, but I find most of them tiring and slight. All of them are written in fourteen lines, but only in a few instances--"Proposition," "Connecticut Sonnet," "Odalisque"--does the form find its justification in the content. The language is an uneasy mixture of registers: slangy, crude, academic, lyrical, archaic. Sometimes, unintentionally funny, as in the title poem, which opens the collection. Describing sex as a gallop up a mountain, the sestet goes: The steeds bear us upslope. We reach the muddy cleft between Maroon Bells and Crested Butte, gnawing on caribou and warmed liver of once noble elk. . Maroon Bells? Crested Butte? The poems are organized into four numbered sections. I find the second most wearying. The poems in it have titles like "Preposition" and "Pronoun/Punctuation." "Conjunctions" begins: Furthermore, until but deth...