Rational Animals - David Schloss

If "politics is personal," many of these poems address politics in various guises: interpersonal, social, and traditionally "political." The "human hive" and "poetry worlds" sometimes appear as a basis for the 'action.' In some sense, the themes form a loose self-portrait of the author's concerns and obsessions; in another sense, the poems often elect to try to transcend the personal, to achieve more "objective" over-views of human activities and experiences. Many are inter-social; relationships between men and women are one common theme. Love and the complex of attendant relations are another thread throughout the book. The conglomeration of seemingly obsessive themes and subject matters may offer a kind of self-portrait of the author: intentionally or not, this book can be read as a kind of Self Portrait in a Funhouse Mirror.