Beautiful Rush

“Does the death of a daughter mean naught? Beautiful Rush, Marc Vincenz’ fifth collection, is haunted by the muse of the speaker acts as witness to her alienation and burden of debt (‘your neck . . . Prodded / with a loan shark’s knife’), an empathy attenuated by his own scientific ratiocinations as ‘other’ (‘What’s it like / to be the victim?’) and offset by his own poetic and anthropologic labor (‘silent grave-digging / for antediluvian bones, for crude evidence / of concerned mammals . . . and those unrepeating, / unrepeating worlds’). The burden of proof Vincenz frames first as beauty, titularly and in ‘ode to beauty,’ yet ultimately, as this book is scored by the hunt for truth (however impossible, as were Cassandra’s words), not comfort, its speaker finds peace in the liminal, before acquiescing to the arrival not of Venus in Furs but a voice speaking in a language we are finally prepared to ‘you hear voices / in hard labor, / and behind closed rooms…something / like knowledge, clearing its throat.’” – Virginia Konchan, Matter Monthly