Red sauce, whiskey and snow

August Kleinzahler has been one of American poetry's best-kept secrets for nearly fifteen years. His new collection, Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow, will dramatically change this situation. The landscapes of these poems are urban, their elements sensuously particularized and positioned to blend in startling and revealing ways. Scenes and characters shift and are spliced together with the audacity and speed of cinematic cuts. But Kleinzahler's signature is his music. His lines are nervously graceful, their movement flexible and deliberate. The voice continually changes register. It is savage, then tender; melancholy, then comic. Combining a broad sweep with deft tactics, his new poems are utterly original and distinctive, a fresh promise for readers weary of the studied postmodernism of much recent poetry.