Chris Vitiello

How to answer questions

Joseph Donahue, 2014 (photo by Star Black).

I read Joe Donahue’s work because it’s purposeful and clear: an applied and reapplicable poetics. I use his poems.

Donahue lays down a lot of references, ranging widely across time and subject area and in close proximity to each other. This produces synthesis, sometimes to a rhetorically breathtaking degree. In the space of a page, Hermes invents the sonogram, Nicodemus waits for Jesus, acid-tripping garage-rockers find purity, and the sun sets behind the pillars of Hercules and rises on Peruvian mountains. It’s more than a mere postmodern mashup; it’s constructive:

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