Is it possible for poetry to be simultaneously raw and elegant, direct and oblique, hurtful and consoling? Yes, says Dear Delinquent, Ann Townsend's incandescent new collection. "My heart presses my ribcage like an octagon fist," she writes, taking on the persona of both betrayed and betrayer. Through poems that masterfully recall the styles of Sylvia Plath or Philip Larkin, Townsend convinces us that, even if its most destructive forms, love is the driving force behind all behavior.
'Dear Delinquent' was Edna St Vincent Millay’s address to her lover, and Townsend’s newest collection―by turns erotic and elegiac―continues in Millay’s passionate lyric tradition. Full of the sensual delights, Townsend explores the (sometimes uneasy) ways in which heartache lives alongside pleasure. A child’s joyful maturation alleviates the tragedy of a lost child, the powerful undertow of sex supersedes the hurt of infidelity. Like the mare who 'only knows the present tense,' we rally, 'testing with [our] teeth' the flimsy boxes that attempt to hold us.
-Paisley Rekdal
Ann Townsend’s latest poetry collection, Dear Delinquent, is such a smart and moving book. The poems have a tender, contrary, emotional and intellectual discipline―silvery and cool in their precise, elegant surfaces, but full of pathos, too, and thrumming with an erotic shiver throughout. In a world of chatty, slack-lined poems, Townsend is able to conjure truths with masterful restraint. This is one of the best books of poetry I’ve read in years.
-Erin Belieu
Elegance. What is it? It’s beauty so sharp it cuts. Thus, the phrasal energy of Ann Townsend’s Dear Delinquent, a book driven by the messiest of human experiences: desire. Making of the heart an infidel, turning illicit lovers into 'butterflies self-immolating/on the compost heap.' These are poems of brutal honesty and incredibly fluid linguistic movement: take for example 'Doll,' where the lover writes to his wife with the speaker in the room: 'Nothing happening / here, he says, / smiling. / And Nothing/steps forward, / into his arms.' The stiletto twists a little in the gut.
-Dana Levin
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