Slantwise

Leaning toward Emily Dickinson's advice to tell it slant, the poems in Betty Adcock's Slantwise approach our losses, including such disasters as September 11 and the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, through happenings outside the public view — asides, as it were, from the primary moment. The title faintly echoes American slang, as in "wisecrack," which might be applied to poems here that skewer literary critics, human self-regard, and the poet herself. Reflecting also the folk speech of...