Scarlet Tanager

Bernadette Mayer

Called “magnificent” by John Ashbery and “consummate” by Robert Creeley, Mayer mixes together delightful epigrams (“What it means to be a mammal / sexually /it’s cute”), long-line free verse, and her astonishing sonnets. There are also curious, extremely witty translations of Mayer poems into joking, free-style French, which are then re-translated back into English, landing quite some ways from the original.