Yo-Yo Logic

There is a kind of alluring, cosmic deadpan to these poems that deftly unveils our contemporary experience of its peculiar and sometimes even Romantic wonders. Playful and impulsive, mirthful and marauding, a little reckless and a lot wry, Lauren Shapiro sees right through the world and feels it deeply with a heart full of butter. Welcome to the gingerbread house. You won't leave hungry. --Dobby Gibson To all you jaded poetry hipsters out there, I double-dog dare you to read Lauren Shapiro's YO-YO LOGIC and not fall passionately and unironically in love with these poems' sly sincerity and hawk-eyed humor. Go ahead, try. --Nick Lantz I've lived / on the edge of an abyss that doesn't even exist, deadpans the canny speaker of this book of bent syllogisms, whose every line upends the sly logic of the line before. With her feet on the moving floor of contemporary culture, and her head buzzing with a love of theory in which the proposition never / leads to the conclusion, Lauren Shapiro is a master of the declarative sentence, the wisecrack that cracks the doors of perception just enough to glimpse an infinite horizon beyond the umbrella-filled drinks at the chi-chi bar. --Suzanne Buffam