Disposable Camera

Disposable Camera For Karen To a disposable camera I have confined the paradise where my sister lives - palisades, sycamores, Sunbathers mistaken for statuary. People with shears, shrubbery cut into sea creatures. Lemon trees bloom in front of houses. Trophy wives escort children through mazes of palm trees.

In the shadows of palms the children paw their toys delicately while the youngest one rides his plastic motorcycle toward his mother with a confidence so absolute, so heartbreakingly beautiful, everybody at the pier hopes nothing will ever humiliate it, that it will persist after the camera runs out of film.

Although Disposable Camera is Janet Foxman's first book-length collection, you would not know it given the wry sophistication of the poems found within. The notion of the disposable camera permeates the entire book, where Foxman considers the instabilities in even our deepest attachments. Here gulfs expand, for instance, between twins, between the musician and his instrument, between the recluse and his inconsolable solitude.

Whether a hermit; a twin; a filmgoer utterly taken with Triumph of the Will; or Masaccio, just after he's painted the Expulsion - the poems' speakers share a nagging anxiety that satisfaction may not exist outside the effort to imagine it, and that efforts at art and making, however compulsory to their executor, are probably regrettable from the start.

A formally inventive and daring book, and one that displays a sophistication well beyond the poet's years, Disposable Camera will be a valuable addition to American poetry. Review: Janet Foxman's Disposable Camera is a brilliant book of great freshness and great originality. It is an exhilarating book, one that keeps the reader off balance about its ambitions and procedures. (Frank Bidart)