Among the Musk Ox People

The fast-moving, jittery poems in this fifth volume from the well-respected Ruefle (The Adamant) try hard to portray the world as her speaker really feels it: "I want," she exclaims, "to have an ecstatic relationship with life." In fluently unpredictable free verse (mostly) and discursive poetic prose (on occasion), Ruefle's work can take in almost anything, the more unexpected the better: "a line of laundry strung out over the Acropolis," "wigs and temperatures and horoscopes," "the moon in utero," drum majorettes, breast milk, the Book of Job and more. Her talent for producing the unexpected can be a weakness: some poems sound almost arbitrary in their choice of line breaks, emphases and endings, favoring individual phrases over the poems they make up. "It is a scrappy place, this world," Ruefle writes in "Cocktail Party," "and people walk about, a series of prepositions displacing the nouns." At her best, Ruefle combines surrealism, comedy and domestic pathos: "You've been crying: your cheeks are a rasher of streaked bacon." While she comes off as more personal, and more various, than her sometime collaborator Dean Young, her abrupt and entertaining style should please his reade