AN AMAZING BOOK. ( )

D.A. Powell is a master of using overt sexuality to mask an even more masterful underlying subtext. It's amazing how someone can toy with language in such a way a refrain can seem present within a poem were words and phrases do not repeat. Coctails shows the mundane and shocking complexity of everyday for a gay man in a city of brick and blue collar. Whereas Tea was a eulogy, a book of AIDS and loss and the lives claimed, Coctails is its opposite, its Whitmanesque singing. His approach to the line as fresh as we've come to expect, a breath both extended and stuttered all at once. Powell is a poet of the body, both its gritty reality and its Platonic ideal. He juxtaposes the voice of the poem with outside voices, song lyrics, and the occasional clip from a John Waters film. Coctails becomes D.A. Powell's Song of Myself, the perfect end-stop to his trilogy in verse. ( )