Afterimage

Afterimage, by Len Krisak, is a masterfully-crafted collection of poems in which we see the persistence of history into the present - the ancient market under the polish of urban architecture, the thrum of Roman crowds amid present-day Boston. Horace and Ovid exist alongside Jeopardy and Clark Kent. Whether in a grand, public mode or quietly elegiac and personal, the poems record our contemporary life, often noting the images from such a distant and literary past strikingly alive in the present. From "the topless towers of Troy" to "the trolley's stair step lip," Krisak writes with a metrical and formal eloquence. His voice is both learned and colloquial, demonstratating a careful attention to language and its power to move us.