Endless Threshold

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

These poems address political and social issues ranging from the exhibition of an irreverent portrait of the mayor of Chicago to the Gulf war. The voice is often emotional and the speaker usually outraged by the real injustices (e.g., racism or government corruption) and cruelties (e.g., the abuse of women) in our society, but the poems fail to analyze the complications inherent in their subjects. Hirschman's politics, sometimes just plain hermetic, remains on the gut level: ``America, you night / of bats and rocks / and garbage under / your white sheets.'' The more personal poems alternate between sentimentality and bad taste: ``She is a languid mouth / making up / before my cock / with a hundred lipsticks . . . .'' Hirschman's ( The Bottom Line ) language, rough, off-the-cuff, slightly bitter, is reminiscent of Philip Levine's, but his poems are technically amateurish: ``We will not know, we've been told, who they are, / the sons and daughters of the working class.'' Like much poetry of this century designed with political intent, this work is drenched in self-indulgence but lacks originality. (June)

Library Journal

In the midst of this streetwise and politically charged book lies a core of memorable portraits of inner-city life. Hirschman evokes a world of skid-row bums where the homeless survive in cardboard boxes, an Hispanic boy dies in a fleabag hotel, and ethnic curiosities (of Chinatown, San Francisco) include street vendors hawking ``manioc stems/ like wooden puppets.'' The scene shifts back and forth between this world and Hirschman's boyhood New York. In ``Nellie,'' he offers a tribute to his abused mother, with her black underwear and blue, belt-buckle bruises. Hirschman loves language, from four-letter words to slang, bookish terms, puns, and slant rhymes (``are, hasard , czar''). Thus, his characters become the ``changelings of funk''; censorship is ``a woman eating out of a garbage can.'' These poems engage the reader on every page. The language is sometimes salty, the ideas often provocative, but the refreshingly nonacademic quality will attract new readers to poetry. Recommended for general collections.-- Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.