Radio, Radio: Poems - Tapa dura

Doyle's poems leap freely from sestina to sonnet to fragment to prose, searching for what they do not know. These are lyrics of serious intelligence -- they think carefully and deliberately but use often startling images and varied, original musics to deepen, widen, and rudder this thinking: "In the middle of every field, / obscured from the side by grass / or cornhusks, is a clearing where / she works burying swans alive / into the black earth" ("Radio, Radio").

Alternately playful, grim, realistic, surreal, tempered, associative, wise, and astonished, Radio, Radio finds an original niche in the poetry of the day, one that uses the veneer of contemporary poetics to reflect the human mind and soul that lie beneath.

A native of Cuba, New York, Ben Doyle is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Tin House, Fence, and The New Republic. He currently lives and teaches in Iowa City.