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Emerson continuedfrom previous page collage engenders self-reflexivity in the viewer/reader , making that viewer/reader aware of the illusory and distorting nature of accepted cultural narratives. Duhamel's artistic approach to collage is flatfooted and simplistic. It's clear that pretty much any e-mail messages would suffice forthe purposes ofthis poem, as would any of the innumerable articles published in the aftermath of the attacks. It is also telling that Duhamel focuses her attention primarily on those in fairly privileged sections of the population who died. Such choices are not ethically or artistically neutral. Neither admiration nor commiseration is obtained by self-display alone. Duhamel's compositional method does not raise questions about what 9/11 meant on many social andpolitical levels orformany differentpeoples and cultures in the world. Duhamel's poem trivializes the radical possibilities of collage—which, according to Marjorie Perloff, "undermines the authority of the individual self, the 'signature' of the poet or painter"—by constellating the events of9/11 around a narrating subjectivity thathas no authority, whether moral, artistic, cultural, or historical. In its radical rather than consumerist forms, collage, as an artistic method, seeks to reveal the inherent discontinuity between hegemonic rhetoric and lived realities. In so doing, rigorous methods of collage implicate the reader as well as the artist, which this poem fails, on every level, to do. In short, Duhamel's failures at the formal, epistemological, historical, and artistic levels constitute not just a failure of feeling, to borrow a phrase from a Stevens's aphorism, but a failure of ethics and artistic integrity. Other poems in the book are similarly infused with the solipsism evident in "Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted," and the poems in Two and Two are rarely more than verbal confections, what Sidney calls "ink-wasting toy[s]." For example, Duhamel is obsessed with lists ofall sorts, and many pieces in Two and Two are driven by no more than relentless verbal accretion, as in "Our Americano": An apple-pieAmericano—attaboy ! —got the ax for being asleep at the switch and back-talking his backasswards ball-busting boss. Though our Americano was a bit of a blowhard, he wasn't a bad egg. His being bagged by his boss made him feel like he had belly-flopped in his birthday suit. Basically, he was over a barrel, with the bejesus knocked out of him, and no matter how hard he beat his brains out, he remained betwixt and between. What ifhe was a bozo bullshit artist who couldn't see the big picture? Maybe, he thought, he should bootlick, belly up to his big shot of a boss. He sat in the can thinking about being canned. He decided he was no comma-counter, no company man. He chugalugged a beer and chowed down on Chinese. . . . On the poem goes, until we get to the end of the alphabet, leaving one to wonder about the larger purpose ofthis poem as well as many others similarly driven by no more than superficial cleverness; perhaps the poet imagines that a "virtuoso" (but in this case, ultimately tedious) display of verbal dexterity is sufficient for a poetics; but neither admiration nor commiseration is obtained by self-display alone. Jocelyn Emerson's collection ofpoems, Sea Gate, waspublished by Alice James Books in 2002. She is currently writing a book on theories of matter and the poetry of seventeenth-century England. She is director ofthe Honors Program in the college ofArts and Sciences at Boston University. An Epitaph for Europa Pawel Frelik Europe Central William T. Vollmann Viking http://www.penguin.com 829 pages; cloth, $39.95 Another book about the tempests of the twentieth century and the rise of two totalitarianisms is probably the last thing a Polish reviewer ofAmerican literature would actually look forward to, but Europe Central proves to be one more humbling lesson in the futility and pointlessness of expectations and pre-reading apprehensions. After the exhausting and somewhat controversial Rising Up and Rising Down (2004), a seven-volume treatise on violence, William T. Vollmann, perhaps one of the most hard-working American authors, is back with yet another big book (that also happens to be...

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