It's hard not to fall in love with a poet who can turn the lost colony of Roanoke and the Dutch tulipomania bubble of the 1630s into forgotten fairy tales . . . Even an excess of charm can't diminish the ravishing intelligence of this fervent, loose-limbed, sprightly book.” —William Logan, The New Criterion
“The merely competent should study Mlinko's work with envy. It's as alive to sound as to social complexity. . . You hear Paul Muldoon, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens in her poems, but as raw material transformed into something more than an amalgam of influence.” —Michael Robbins, The Chicago Tribune
“Mlinko treats the reader to lines that feel both alive and spectral.” —The Paris Review Daily
“In later work, Mlinko resembles Frank O'Hara in her attention to artists, intellectuals, and the trending culture of an age . . . [Mlinko] creates a rich sonic topography . . . dream-inducing consonance . . . picture-perfect imagery . . . aurally orgasmic acoustic creativity.” —Booklist
“Mlinko's linguistic abilities are obviously sophisticated . . . we marvel at the times and places described.” —Publishers Weekly
“The poems in Marvelous Things Overheard have something in common with those film sequences that begin with an amoeba, and then pull quickly back until you see all of New York City, and then the earth, and then the solar system, and then the Milky Way. They reveal the connections between seemingly unlike things. The poems also posit these as "human" connections, inasmuch as the history of any one of us depends on the history of all of us. . . . Myths, Greek and otherwise, represent attempts to make sense of the senseless through story-telling, to create contexts for the world's otherwise disparate (and uncaring) mess of facts. Mlinko's poetry at once resists and takes part in this anxious embroidery, in the very human need to take each marvelous thing in turn, and try to bind them all together.” —Maureen Thorson, Open Letters Monthly
“Here are marvels, mysteries, melancholia; here are New World cicadas, Cypriot potatoes, kiddie boats, the Mediterranean; here is a glorious babble of tongues sung through. Mlinko has a mythy, musical mind. A sensuous intelligence threads us through a glittering word-hoard, its mind-shield. Mlinko writes a sumptuous, surprising, highwire poetry. Its neo-Elizabethan dazzle directs us to the core of our lives as animals of and in language, ‘evolving / only toward more feeling.' This book is an astonishment.” —Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets and World Enough
Mlinko’s new book takes its title from a collection of ancient rumors about Mediterranean civilizations; it’s a triptych of descriptions interweaving the past with the present, echoing sometimes a ruminative Elizabeth Bishop, sometimes an elegantly fractured George Oppen. From a riff on Beowulf—complete with glossary—to a “Cantata for Lynette Roberts,” the book is strongest where Mlinko goes beyond description to assert (“A dog roughs his tongue lapping rain on cement./ A callus rises. But words? Words are the reverse of pain./ Where pain is no words are. Apollo loves words”), or question (“if I could describe it,/ I could have it? Like an ancient contest?”), or make strange (“You could truncate butterfly to butte// and still get migration and a cumin route./ But not camel./ Not emu. Not Tuareg.”). Operating on the idea that “What’s gone becomes our greatest marvel,” Mlinko’s linguistic abilities are obviously sophisticated, but describing too literally the marvels of history and mythology risks demoting language to mere conveyer, creating a sometimes awkward tension in the book: we marvel at the times and places described—turning toward a search engine for more information—rather than the poems describing them. Then again, perhaps this is a postmodern intention; as Robert Rauschenberg said, “My paintings are invitations to look somewhere else.” (Sept.)
Porticoes and potatoes, Narcissus and "scissor us," goblin and robin: not rhyme but phoneme mirroring, perhaps, is what illuminates this "poetry of metals and alloys," Mlinko's (Starred Wire) fourth collection, as it perpetrates its "ear raids"—this last is Mlinko's characterization of the poetry of forgotten modernist Lynette Roberts, but it might also apply to herself. Pillaging the marvelous overheard of myth and science, the poet spikes her similes—"Good riddance to the husband who put the steak knives point-up like myrmidons in the dishwasher." "Wingadecioia" may be either a ballade or a villanelle, it's hard to tell, but its wordplay shimmers—"Whoso list to hunt it with a camera?/ The Carolina parrot is extinct./ Hunted to nothing emerald./ We'll never see its plumage,/ which lives only in the image/ of psittacines caught on camera…." With middle age on the horizon, the poet reflects, "there's little magic that remains/ except as what has managed to escape us:/ What is gone becomes our greatest marvel…." In the uneasy "Bliss Street," the clouds above a son's "mesh cage" of a playground resemble "putty, not putti"; she finds poignancy in the present. VERDICT National Poetry Series award winner Mlinko is an edgy, ambitious poet who likes to play; recommended for the voracious and experimental. Readers may benefit from easy access to a Google search; there's a lot going on here.—Ellen Kaufman, New York
