…The narrator of Buffam’s addictive first collection is the antithesis of every poetic stereotype. She is direct and plain-spoken. She faces facts. She is hard-nosed. She is witty and doesn’t let herself get away with a single illusion, though she lets us watch her try. Again and again she catches herself out. From the first poem, the wry romp “Another Bildungsroman”—in which the narrator takes in stride the discovery of “how much larger my small fortune / could have been by now if only”—to the final piece, the prose poem “Mariner,” which kicks off “Sometimes I eat an orange and completely forget about dying,” Buffam is remarkably consistent in voice, in tone, in the stark quality of language that reveals, time and again, the basic confusion that sits at the heart of each person. Every poem spits out like a “Here we go again” confession to a friend—or perhaps a psychologist—but without that melodramatic self-importance that characterizes the ubiquitous, tiresome confessional poem. Here we have no hesitation, no self-pity—and a merciless, marching-down-the-sidewalk rhythm to match. In “In Which I Am Attacked,” Buffam writes, “I thought it was spring / and went out without my hat, without / my hatchet. Wrong again.” In “Intro to Lit,” she declares, “There is no one to instruct me. / My guide has vanished in a chalky cloud.” But she acts nonetheless. She shuts the door, takes a seat, looks around. She eyes the world with a puzzled dismay, but accepts that dismay with a shrug and moves on. The person in these poems is a fatalist, but she’s also a good sport. She feels the invisible hand on the small of her back and lets herself be pushed, but plays up the drama while she’s at it—why let the moment go unremarked, when the remark is the one thing she can control? If Buffam’s book has a flaw it’s in its singularity of style and persona, but that’s only really a flaw if she wears you down. This didn’t happen to me. Buffam recognizes, as in “Inklings,” that it’s possible to “stray towards grace.” In each piece she leaves room for such straying. But she also knows that in all poems exists room for cunning protest, a measure of revenge, against the harsh realities that even dreamy poets endure. She goes both ways nearly every time.

⁰ Arc 55, Winter 2005