Flying blind

Sharon Bryan's new collection pays elegant homage to language. Arranged alphabetically, Flying Blind will appeal to anyone who appreciates the sobering effect of a good pun as well as the static jolt of sudden consciousness. Her poems are like riddles: irreverent, irrepressible, precocious and playful. But as much fun as she clearly has with words, they are, in the final analysis, no joke. Like Dickinson, Bryan is fascinated by language and obsessed by death; her poems are generated from the friction of the two. "I wanted these poems to dance as well as to sing, to whistle as they pass the graveyard ..."