Ben Doller’s third book, Dead Ahead, is a kaleidoscopic tour-de-force of whimsy and wordplay, yet it is also serious and severe. It uses the tension and release of jokes, but it is demanding and fulfills the reader with its rigor. Sometimes fragmentary, the poems nonetheless offer a sensation of completed statement. There is little in these poems that readers of poetry think of as “personal,” so they could be called anti-lyrical; rarely does a first-person speaker appear to reveal himself. Doller’s facility with language, and his wheeling imagination, which pushes language into fresh directions, never ceases to delight the reader.
The publisher’s ridiculous summary on the book cover will tell you the book alludes to a 17th Century English buccaneer and sea captain, William Dampier and the Widow Ching, another pirate who appears in a Borges story. This does not seem to affect the poems; they’re interesting without this scaffolding, some of which might be ornamental. I don’t know what the cover copy is trying to say here: “Doller troubles the blast zone where evolution and manifest destiny collide.” The book is much more vibrant and evocative than that vacuous nonsense suggests.
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