No Girls No Telephones

Book excerpt: Poetry. Brittany Cavallaro and Rebecca Hazelton began with the proposition that the opposite of a dream song might be waking speech. Or a sleepless anthem. Or wakeful silence. Then they reversed that notion, and reversed it again. Through an intrepid, always devoted, often cheeky engagement with John Berryman's The Dream Songs, the 26 poems in NO GIRLS NO TELEPHONES strike out for an unmapped horizon where ruined fairy stories, dreams, and self-deception all collide in a perfect storm of "the possibility of Past and Perfect" and "the certainty of the Now and New." These poems are no mere act of homage. Suggestive of the brittle aspirations, illusions, and delusions that permeate our everyday lives, NO GIRLS NO TELEPHONES invites us into a world where, "naïve on the rim / of a glass teacup," men and women exist at odds with one other and with a frighteningly indifferent, fiercely beautiful world.