B Is for Bad Poetry

Forget Shakespeare. Don’t count on Donne. Shelley and Keats: banished! And there’s absolutely no poet laureate from the golden or any other age. So fawning PhDs in love with little-understood verses by long-dead writers should go elsewhere. This is poetry for the rest of us—bad poetry! Pamela Russell’s unexalted (but thoroughly hysterical) poems mock, chide, accuse, tease, joke, undermine, point, and laugh at the world around us—and at anything that takes itself too seriously. Her non-canon...