Three Debuts and a Prequel

The day room is a solar cell, pure science, light kept captive in the quietest of solariums.Most of the poems in the sections that follow are written in orderly stanzas; even when the lines leave the left margin, they do so in a regular manner with a close attention to the aesthetics of form.[...]in this collection too, the choice of form inflects the meaning of the text; the regularity of metre, line length, and stanzas lends weight and an air of ironic seriousness to topics (Expo 86, fast-food restaurants, and waterslides, for example) that in freer forms might appear unambiguously light.From the outset, McGuire makes it clear that this is going to be fun; his loping rhythms, gaudy rhymes, and preposterous metaphors romp through a country club in combat boots, knocking convention into the sandpits along the way.