MY DOOMSDAY SAMPLER

paper 0-8071-2403-6 The third volume by LSU’s poet-in-residence is a curiosity of sorts: Owen invents her own easy genre, then works it to death in these formulaic poems, with little interior complexity or attention to language. The fifty here, most made up of seven short- lined quatrains, take as points of departure common figures of speech, then attempt to restore meaning to the lost metaphoric content. Thus, —The Fly in the Ointment— is stuck in a hell of filth; —That One Squeaky Wheel— gets the grease because it rightfully deserves the attention; and —Dead Reckoning— simply catalogues the many phrases incorporating the word —dead.— Owen also plays with morality tales by reimagining classic fables: The ant in —The Ant and the Grasshopper— adheres to its survival instinct; in the —The Flaw in the Flue,— the flea and the fly outsmart the flue’s cruel intentions; and the spider is quite considerate of the fly before eating it in —The Spider to the Fly.— A handful of poems reflect on Owen’s craft and its clichÇs; she asks us to consider the finality of —periods,— the quality of —ink,— and the idea of something —Written in Blood.— But her take on the phrase —Work Myself to Death— is pitiful at best: She wants us to feel the pain and suffering that goes into her unrecompensed art. The cleverest aspect of the title poem is its title: the idea of apocalyptic needlework has little to do with the poem itself, an abcedarium that comments on the visual traits of letters in the alphabet. Despite a few buried references to the environment, Owen seldom escapes her admittedly —cute language,— and few of her conundrums are as funny or inventive as you’d expect.