What Kind

Drawing on fairy tales and imbued with an almost antique diction, What Kind uses wit and word play to approach the thorn-ridden thicket of family, memory, sex and belonging. Many of the poems seem to speak uncannily from a child's perspective--a child seeking solace in relationships with animals and other creatures both real and imaginary. Many poets concern themselves with country matters and mortal mechanisms, but Martha Zweig alone hatches them out of language itself. She is an exquisite analyst of colloquialism, and the syntactical precisions at work within her old New England parlances are uncommonly refined. This book follows Zweig's brilliant debut collection Vinegar Bone, hailed by Publisher's Weekly as a "unique blend of scary folktale imagery, American plain speech and a planed-down formalism."