Excerpt from Lynn Domina review:

“Nearly twenty years ago when I read Marilyn Krysl’s Warscape with Lovers, already her seventh collection of poetry, I learned something crucial. Krysl is, as anyone who has read much of her work knows, a master of the sestina. It’s a form that’s easy to write very badly and extraordinarily difficult to write at all well. Its six repeated words, the teleutons, can so dominate the writer’s consciousness that the entire rhythm—not only the content—of the poem is controlled by their presence. All movement in the poem is thrust toward them, even if the lines are enjambed and the sentences develop beyond them. Reading Krysl’s sestinas, I noticed a different strategy. In “Nammu: To Adam,” for example, or even moreso in the book’s title poem, “Warscape with Lovers,” Krysl relies on other content to determine the rhythm, lovemaking or an ocean’s waves or fear. The rhythm of the line, therefore, becomes at least as strong as the lexical repetition required by the form, until the repetition recedes from the reader’s ear. Sestinas so often collapse in on themselves—much more often than poems in other forms—but Krysl’s escape this fate because she approaches this potentially heavy-handed form with an extraordinarily light touch. Once I understood why Krysl’s sestinas succeeded so well, I understood form itself much more fully. There are only two or three other contemporary poets whose work has taught me so much.

—Lynn Domina, author of Corporal Works

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