A quality found in Anticline's poetry that I have not mentioned yet is humor. Whether from black humor, as I sort of find in the poem posted yesterday, Dear Sign, or the swift, playful language that's reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sprung rhythm, or dealing with the transmogrification of Mr. Eshleman's foreskin within the first couple pages, if a reader doesn't pick up on some of the light hearted aspects, much would be lost. If not everything. From Meanother:


I lifted my "face-before-birth" out of its vaginal loan,
the back of its head rich in salamander pigtails,
cutthroat eels, tubeworms that vibrate in methane seeps.

I moved into a soul pouch as if into a uniform of water--
Sweet Pea appeared, Veronica and Archie,
a flood of Toons wiggling like liquid termites.

To wear oneself as other, to hybridize

a single destiny into one that is multifoliate.....

[...

...]

Yaw in roll with yaw,
the poem now tintannabulates into auto-yabyum,
happy in its vulvic cap, a six-eyed imp,
madre succulent, Sweet Pea nosy, pater free.