Transistor Rodeo mini-review in The Literary Review

So, I just found this short review of my book in the Summer 2011 issue of The Literary Review. Thanks to reviewer Sarah Barber for the kid words:

Jon Wilkins

Transistor Rodeo

University of Utah Press, 2010

Jon Wilkins’s  Transistor Rodeo  is a portable rodeo where poems barrel through American cities from Memphis to Los Angeles, roping in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, James Madison, tired waitresses, the Pope, and proms. In an explosion of association, invocation, and formal trickery, this daredevil of a book asks us to consider the seriousness of play, to imagine the wolf-whistle as an endangered species, to picture the “wee symbolic life” of people living in a topographical map, and, above all, to enjoy the smash and noise of language, “a hammer / in a London china shoppe.” Wilkins lets us pretend to be very skilled rodeo riders, crashing around without taking any very bad tumbles. —Sarah Barber