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Synopsis
Consult any childhood development guide and you'll find the term "parallel play": when children under two are placed together, they'll play separately but won't interact. They are more fascinated with their immediate surroundings than with each other.
Stephen Burt's second collection of poems, Parallel Play, describes lovers, friends, travelers, and revelers attempting lives dependent on each other but still pulled inevitably into preoccupations of their own self-awareness. When there are many obstacles—overeducation, narcissism, extended adolescence, nomadic existence—how can Americans crawl out of the nursery and coexist if they increasingly have to learn to do so as adults?
Jennifer Grotz
One of the recurring surprises in Parallel Play is the breadth of Burt's fascination with contemporary culture (Kitty Pryde is a heroine from the X-Men comic books). A poem written from the perspective of Pierre Bonnard's "Standing Nude" sits next to a villanelle for WNBA player Lindsay Whalen; another explores "Scenes from Next Week's Buffy the Vampire Slayer ." One gleans an earnest desire to make poems out of the flotsam and jetsam of American life.The intent is to sensitize readers to the overlooked aspects of contemporary life. These intentions are felt as well in the collection's suite of political poems, which includes a moving elegy to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone as well as a sestina that laments: "It's an old problem: how do we go on being/so comfortable, and so troubled? Are we poor/losers? Am I one of the evildoers?"
&151; The Washington Post