Voice-Over Book

This is the kind of book I enjoy reading in the afternoon. Lots of lines that can be pulled out as aphorisms. Witty and incisive looks into consumer culture. Lovely and light and fun, with a hidden undercurrent of disaster.

And the descriptions, so apt, so original. I would like to give this book a 4.5 since it is better than most books I mark as 4's, but not quite the genius that it takes for me to assign a 5.

A sample of Elaine Equi's aphorims:

Culture's mirrors are all one way

What is the sky anyway, / but a reply to the earth.

The poem is a small machine made of God.

In poems we shine, // and though we say them with conviction, / the words are never really ours for keeps.

What speech shares with birds: both live in the air.


1/3/08 Okay, I am changing my rating of this book to five points. It's a few weeks later and this book is still on my mind, and the books of poetry I've been reading in the interim don't get close to giving me the pleasure this one did, so it does in fact deserve five stars.