“I have something of an anxiety regarding project books of poetry, simply because the risks seem, somehow, even greater than the risk of just plain old poetry. Take something like Kiki Petrosino’s Fort Red Border, a book which anagrams Robert Redford’s name for its title and which features Redford himself as a character. That stunning book’s easy to bring up and say hey, not so bad, but the dangers of books like that seem huge, to whit: what if Petrosino hadn’t been successful in Fort Red Border? It wouldn’t merely have been that she’d written a crappy book; it’d’ve been not just bad but silly, somehow almost embarrassing (a dumb book of poetry centering around Robert Redford? Come on). I can’t imagine I’m the only one who feels or thinks this way.”
- Weston Cutter reviews The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka, which focuses on boxer Jack Johnson.