Miss Plastique

by Lynn Levin

Miss Plastique, the fourth full-length poetry collection by Lynn Levin, invites the reader into a world of female bravado in which Miss Plastique and her many selves rant, fret, joke, fall in love, dress up, and do their hair. Poems in this collection first appeared in Boulevard, Artful Dodge, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, Knockout, Nerve Cowboy, and other places. Lynn Levin, a poet known for her eclecticism, humor, and range of poetic styles, is the author of the previous poetry collections Fair Creatures of an Hour, a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry; Imaginarium, a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award; and A Few Questions about Paradise (all from Loonfeather Press). Her craft of poetry book, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (with Valerie Fox) is forthcoming from Texture Press in 2013. Lynn Levin is also a writer and literary translator. She has received nine Pushcart Prize nominations, two grants from the Leeway Foundation, and Garrison Keillor has read her work on his radio show The Writer's Almanac. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Levin has lived in the Philadelphia area since 1980. She is the 1999 Bucks County, Pa. poet laureate and currently teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. Advance praise for Miss Plastique: Miss Plastique is a busy girl: giving it to her enemy in stiletto heels, giving it up to an Elvis impersonator, thumbing a ride across Texas. She has turned from the mirror and can't look back. She's sexy and seductive and refuses to be pinned down; she's silk so fluid you could drink her-read her instead, but watch she doesn't explode in your hands. -Meg Kearney, author of Home By Now The poems in Lynn Levin's Miss Plastique hold their tension between fantasy and devastation. -Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Necropolis This book is just as explosive as plastique and packed as tightly and with the impeccable craft you'd expect from a good detonation expert. Lynn Levin has the perfect timing and sensitive touch of one who works with volatile materials-an Elvis impersonator, the Beav and Eddie Haskell, Gaspara Stampa, Eve and Lilith at Macy's. We are better for the aftershocks of this verse. -Christopher Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2013

Reviews

[Arlene Ang · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning collection. The poems in Miss Plastique are witty, engaging, and introspective — with wonderfully sexy overtones. I particularly enjoyed the poem "Being Me" for the narrator's ability to smile at her own foibles on the road and in life:

On my way to the bed and breakfast
I took every wrong exit. I thought
I was going to have to start

a completely new life.
I have an excellent homing device
for error.

[Mary Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting collection of poems by former Bucks county poet laureate. I realized that you can go anywhere in poetry if you just give yourself the freedom.

[literaryelise · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Your mouth is a honeyed shape of air. / Hand me a knife. I will slice an apple to dip in it.”

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miss Plastique by Lynn Levin reminded me of the comic book character Plastique in that many of the female narrators in this collection are very explosive. And the cover of this collection is very ironic, with the sweet looking Barbie doll decked out in a corset-like shirt and chain necklaces, giving a hint of her edginess. In one of the first poems, “Miss Plastique,” Levin references the explosive nature of C-4 and how it must be handled with care, much like the narrator. Levin examines the notion of judging a book by its cover, and how something that doesn’t look dangerous can be exactly that.

Some poems have a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, like in “The Foundations of Poetry,” the narrator recounts some advice from an English teacher long ago, “‘You should expose/your thoughts and feelings/when you write poems,’ taught Mrs. Hay./’In verse, a little thigh is fine/and you may dream your truth into your lines./Only do not lie to yourself.’//” (page 16) These poems contain material that can be explosive if not handled with care, but in Levin’s hands the tension in the poem is sometimes just enough to sustain it without a bomb going off, but in other poems, there is just no other way to express the emotion that has been building.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2013/05/m...