Kill or Cure

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AUG 1, 1994

To read Waldman's (Suffer the Mysterium) collection of new work and previously uncollected poetry is to revisit the era of Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and the Beats and reopen the window of Woodstockean sensuality, spontaneity and ``global poetics.'' A performance artist, an educator and a poet for the past three decades, Waldman here offers readers a compendium of aesthetic credos, other ideologies, feminist paeans, naive graphics and linguistic excursions into Spanish, Buddhist Tantras and Chaucerian English. Cautioned by the writer's expressed disinterest in ``linear time'' and ``the tongue of discursive mind,'' and by her interest in ``the phones & phonemes of experience, the language moment to moment,'' readers should not be surprised if they sometimes stumble over inchoate imagery or fall outside the rambling rhythms of the poems. Waldman's most accessible work may be her retrospective studies-such as ``Shaman Hisses You Slide Back into the Night,'' portraying the relation between Bob Dylan and his entourage-and her ``political rants,'' e.g., in support of ecology. Her belief in a community of kindred spirits, the ``body poetics,'' is persuasive, impelling new readers to ``Break out of the circle, go to my book/ It's as big as the world.''