Thoughts from a Queen-sized Bed (review)

of uppercrust refinement, though stripped of upper class prejudices or sensibilities. Mentally tirelessness, she questions. But these questions are posed as grown-up-to-grown-up observations, never disrespectful bullyings. She is a woman of taste, commenting on matters of the heart and body. Her poems are quiet at the level of corporeal self and ideational strangeness, precisely where Carson is most wild. Ultimately, Cooper’s gift to the reader is the belief that the how of a poem’s making, its unfinished and honest uncertainties, can be of as much value as a polished but repetitive or less honest moment of song. She takes this gift from a close association with the feminist cannon (though she stands toward it a bit the way Thomas Hardy might had he made a visit to Rukeyser, Stein, Jordan, and Rich). Cooper reminds us that the route to these moments of epiphany and honesty is to keep revising and revisiting our lives, our words, our lines, and ourselves. And to respect and choose