Colorado Review has just posted a review of The Real World

Colorado Review has just posted a review of The Real World by Emma Winsor Wood. Here is a brief excerpt:

Book Review

I’ll begin my review with this somewhat embarrassing disclosure: In recent years, I’ve been basically a TV show illiterate, never having watched popular series such as The Killing, The Good Place, The Real World, Westworld, Game of Thrones, or Madmen. Why does this matter? Not keeping up with American TV programs can limit one’s repertoire for small talk when in conversation with family, friends, neighbors, new acquaintances, coworkers—i.e., with many of one’s fellow Americans. It can also limit one’s avenues for processing some of the conflicts, anxieties, and cultural values swirling around America in the present moment. It can even limit one’s appreciation of an innovative book of poetry such as the one under consideration here. Emma Winsor Wood, author of The Real World, is someone who is conversant with television. And the kind of televised entertainment that interests her in this book—mostly shows with continuing storylines that develop across seasons—makes the book’s disjunctive, aphoristic responses to what’s on TV both strange and fascinating. And, for the most part, very funny.

The names of the first four programs I mentioned serve as section titles for Wood’s book, and these, along with two other sections entitled “Commercial Break” and “Saturday Cartoons,” provide The Real World with an organizational frame that lends an overall coherence and continuity to a book whose serial poems thrive on incongruity and discontinuity. The tensions between order and disorder (in two sections poems are even further divided into episodes or seasons) sets up a sort of rivalry between the comic and the serious, between the author and her speakers, between what’s outside the book and what’s in it. The gaps provide Wood with ample grounds for trenchant social critique and inventive satire.

 

Read the whole review here

Buy The Real World by Emma Winsor Wood here