Daniel Bouchard's diminutive Revolutions is 'okay', but I'm struck how ordinary it is. or mainstream, even. the observant, somewhat suffering 'I', in a forest of 'these things going on'. if he were clumsier, phonier, etc, the poems could meet their fate in Poetry mag. ooo, that's rough talk, Allen. I mean the sensibility isn't so far from that. he certainly has a much better ear than Poetry's crowd displays. poetry isn't opinion, which is where I think I lose it with Bouchard. it's not that I disagree with him politically, it's that his opinions just hang there in unexamined rhetorical device. what I like about Kevin Magee is his penetration of that rhetorical device. and why Silliman's warmth towards Bouchard's poetics seems so misplaced is that Silliman's work too bases itself in a consideration of he very rhetoric and language performance in which opinions arise. I squawked about the poem Bouchard posted to Poetics, for it was so determined. tho Hilton Obenzinger did worse with a terrible, sentimental piece posted to Poetics (check Poetics archives as of 7/9). my copy of the book came from a used bookstore in Somerville. it was a review copy. so that's where all the review copies go. re that, I found an inscribed copy of a book by Richard Hugo in a used bookstore. I would not've bought it except for the inscription. Hugo wrote something like, here's to a fellow poet. you can imagine a student or faculty member meeting the famous visiting poet, and that poet generous enough to show respect to one less published. worth a buck or two, eh? well, you get used to seeing books inscribed with love and best wishes from lovers and parents, latterly sold for cheap.