![]() ![]() “Such a sad awakening” to learn that our lives are like that broken promise, “a sad awakening … the day the sea monkeys arrived in the mail, no proud sea monarch or tiny mermaid minions, no castle, no scepter, no crown, just a little paper packet of dried brine shrimp which, tumbled into a fishbowl, resembled wriggling microscopic larvae, resembled sediment in pond water, swirling and drifting and settling.” I doubt that McGrath intended this analogy for how it feels to read his new book, which is simply lame. IN THE TITULAR prose poem of his new collection, Campbell McGrath likens our lives to “dreams, luminous tapestries woven by a mechanism like the star machine at the planetarium, realms of fantastic desire and possibility, like the kingdom of the sea monkeys promised in the back pages of comic books of my childhood.” Dreams are not known for their realism, which leads to quite a letdown when fantastic desires prove as fantastical as an advertised kingdom of sea monkeys. ![]()
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