Criminal Sonnets

"...Koestenbaum's "Criminal Sonnets" reflect an out-of-control world of lawlessness and paranoia. Horrible, yet grimly funny, some based on newspaper stories, they invite the reader into the mind of a poet who connects our century's greatest crimes with the calamity of her personal history. Our attention is trapped by [her] revolutionary forms as much as by the wickedness and cruelty uniting public and private lives. The sorcery in this is that they show us how poetry, these poems, written in extreme circumstances, enabled her life and her work.