Deer Table Legs

Few first books of the last decade have attempted such a delicate challenge as this one. A subtle variation on Romeo and Juliet, Deer Table Legs is multicultural in the widest, most generous use of that term. Sometimes locating her poems in the Iran of her birth, Katayoon Zandvakili tells more than one kind of love story here in narrative filled with irony and tenderness. In "The Boy and the Girl, " the face of the beloved is "the kind of face that sits well by the fireplace, / listens late into the night, wears the sleeve of years" But in "Jerkfish, " "Your face came into mine / with the brilliance of teeth, loud water promises." With titles as enigmatic and illusive as those of Wallace Stevens, these poems verge on the dreamlike but hold always to a dramatic clarity.