My Oblique Strategeis

Winner of the Frank O'Hara Chapbook Award

"As a still unfurled Camp Fire Girl,” the poet writes, “I tried to collect/ beads for good deeds but only ended up with a choker. Fashionable, / but tight.” Toni Mirosevich’s collection, My Oblique Strategies, is fashionable and tight. In short, impeccably crafted poems, Mirosevich romps from high-brow to low-brow and back again—Dickens to Dallas, Hoffa to Truffaut—with unusual wit, control, and range. Like Kay Ryan and John Ashberry, Mirosevich lets language out to play, with absurd, surprising, and enormously satisfying results. “So let sleeping dogs lie,” she writes in the poem, “Lie or Lay,” “embellish, let them gild/ (or yellow) the lily. My Bonnie dog lies, not lays, / over the ocean. Either way it’s a wide, wide sea/ and if truth be told we’re all in it very, very deep.

— Kathy Fagan, author of The Charm