Sleepers wake

Caroline Knox is a smart and genuinely funny poet. The poems in Sleepers Wake, Knox's third collection, are informed by a bewildering array of comic inventiveness. Various American voices call from unexpected settings: a gothic cottage, a prairie mission, a pleasure barge in Canton. She delights in switching diction levels and playing with the gap between style and content. She makes the arcane familiar. Using material from unexpected sources, including dry epistolary exchanges, even stale jokes and mathematical equations, she transforms the prosaic into a poetry that is in the words of one critic, "rich with a strange and complex music" (Tom Andrews, Poetry East). Knox reminds us that all poetic constructions are the product of human labor and are, therefore, provisional, no matter how much they might wish to capture the eternal. With an unerring but affectionate aim, she skewers our pretensions and questions our conventions.