Sex Augury
by C Bain
I wanted to buy a W.H. Auden poetry book because I had run across another one of his poems I couldn't stop thinking about, and this was next to it on the shelf and I flipped through it and was tempted. It's a very good cover/title.
Some of these were very meh to me, but some also worked really well. I liked many of the Greek mythology, especially Underworld ("what you love disfigures you/until you look like it/a boy/a mouth") and Minotaur, and the science/mythology/personal mashup of Uranus. The Metamorphosis ones did pretty well as a series - I never finished reading Ovid in college, because I never finished any book that was assigned to me, but I think I'm picking up what he's putting down.
My favorite, and definitely the most successful at the mashup of science/culture/medicine/violence that C. Bain is trying a bunch of different ways throughout, is Exchange Rate. I love a good use of repetition with mutation. Or do I like it so much because it's towards the end of the book and using the dense metaphors that have been established gradually over the course of the rest of the book, and so Exchange Rate is the payoff?