The Year of the Rooster

Book excerpt: Poetry. THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER offers in its title work a kinetic, convulsive, epic poem that explores and explodes through slippery, circumspect pronouns expectations of gender, the authority of artifice, the act of looking, and the action of thought. Is the rooster a trope? Is he a trooper? Maybe he's a she and she's the expectation of masculine bravado he's trying to unmask. Part action painting, part abstract estrangement, part enactment of the artist's uncertainty about all things art, the weird world of this poem is forever in flux, off-kilter, unanswerable. Planting bullets in the flowerbed of the sonnet, "Diminishing Returns" and "Returning Diminishments," two extended, meditative yet humorous suites, bookend the title poem.