Know Thyself

Joyce Peseroff's new collection teases the nature of self-knowledge from a world where identity is fluid, character fragmented, landscape overwhelmed, and culture riven. In poems that dramatize politics, eros, myth, and mortality, Peseroff's edgy wit cuts through the classical Greek definition--"You're not an animal/or a god, take the middle path"--to parse our century's slippery dialectics. Playful and complex, Know Thyself distills music from the salt of human experience.