Notes on Some Mariners

As I begin Stacy Szymaszek's Some Mariners, some impressions:

James: Interesting that while James is a character in the referential sense, his name also appears as an acrostic and below some of the book's translations. An explicit distribution of identity through various elements of language — referential, material, intertextual — including the author.

Sound: Each poem a drama of sound:

  spirited tars brawl sunward



  one holds a reptile egg



  who is too pretty to smack



  holds the egg to the sun's



  thermal bottom

One or more L's characterize (at least for me) each line but one, which ends with the poem's only k, a moment of violence.