Last Date

Ted Pearson writes in sentences that pay readers back handsomely for their attention. “Psychoanalysis still makes sense where people take siestas.” This is a wry comment on the trajectory of Freudianism (maybe nodding toward Lacanianism in Argentina); but it’s also a bravura messing around with sibilance, the “sis” of psychoanalysis sliding through “still” and “sense” to end up recumbent in “siesta” (not unlike an analysand on the couch). The three impressive sequences in Last Date might be called “sonnets three ways” — whether in prose, block stanzas, or spread-out quatrains, each piece keeps its rendezvous with the number 14. But don’t let the visual exactitude of these pages, the dexterity with cadence, the overall formal virtuosity fool you — these are unflinchingly improvisatory stretches of writing. Pearson works in real time, alert to up and down drafts, stoic, amused, utopic, realistic. The readers get the rewards.

—Bob Perelman