Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background

Fast, obsessive, jumpy, tender, and joyful, the poems in Wayne Koestenbaum's Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background take his signature themes—stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation—and cut them into serial tidbits that employ techniques of pointillism, mosaic, grid, aphorism, litany, and philosophical investigation. The luminaries in this memory-theater range from Yvonne de Carlo to Hannah Arendt. A trip to Venice and an invocation to an eschatological ice-cream man are the two longest trysts in a book exquisitely composed of "bits" that betoken a new brutalism in a writer known for svelte cadences and artful dodges.