from Allison Joseph Carnegie Mellon University Pres April 2003 $1295 ISBN 0-887-48386-0 The piece of poetrys in Joseph's fourth book of verse adhere to principles of representation.

from Allison Joseph Carnegie Mellon University Pres April 2003 $1295 ISBN 0-887-48386-0

The piece of poetrys in Joseph's fourth book of verse adhere to principles of representation, in accessible language with a deliberate absence of abstraction. The author of poems recalls experiences from summer camp to classroom. Joseph wants to describe a specific woman's self-conscious evolution in a West Indian family in the Bronx on the other hand the poems could be observations of any American life. In "Translating My Parents," the speaker's working-class father admonishes, "write it properly,/...and write/it plainly, in the same manner I can read it."

Joseph is at her best when descrying the limitations of sex "What Friends Are For" particularizes the experience of three friends daydreaming in a store's furniture department after academy Mothers stand in the doorways of houses "full of furniture too old for the house we dreamed of/ the household our mothers could never own"

The journalistic narrative of the metrical compositions invites us to discover a speaker who is universal, on the contrary for the sake of nostalgia alone. They make little attempt to illuminate.

--Gregory Pardlo is an associate editor of Painted Bride Quarterly.

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