Rosmarie Waldrop

Elizabeth Willis, in an extract from her article in The Prose Poem . . . (1994)

Formally, Waldrop's prose poems read like syllogisms, but their meaning is multiple rather than reductive or elided. These sentences do not lead us methodically to a strictly conceived illumination. In- stead, they refer backward and forward within the book, so that the overall effect is that of dreaming. As readers we are often unable to distinguish syntactically an insight from an observation, a quip, an ac- cusation, a foreshadowing, or a rebuttal of what has gone before, since a sentence will often perform, structurally, many of these functions at once. A single dangling modifier finds us guilty in our over-achieving desire to construct meaning at the same time that it reevaluates the role of a partner:

This is an attempt to make up for inner emptiness in the way that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance with more desper- ate brio to add a third dimension to their characte