Balance Sheets

Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History:

"I see Wallace Stevens' influence in many poems, and appreciate the general literariness of them all."

Alicia Ostriker, American poet and scholar:

"'On purpose, on form, on task, on point / we wiggle from state to state.' So notes the poet Mark Scott with a straight face in Balance Sheets, his mind-bending compendium of provocative and encyclopedic assertions, jests, confessions, elegies, satiric pokes, semi-satiric yearnings, and acrobatic plays on and under and around language, that made this reader, for one, into a collector of unpredictable treasures and pleasures.

A poem entitled Patience opens like this: 'I knew a girl who used to break boys in. / She had me kiss her on the forehead. / She felt like an old hand.'

Another, called Our Unsung Heroes, has this start: 'Our unsung heroes are better off unsung. / If you look at them in the latest book / concerning Lincoln's last twenty-four hours, / you see them scruffy, unkempt, / their dull black hair matted down. / They're all tied at the neck with those ties / Lincoln himself never cared to make appear tied.'

Lyric adorns and troubles Ideated Sensations with 'The bumpy forehead of / the goat, / the lithe body of the stoat, / the gerbil's nose, the cat's back, / the horse's throat.'

Scott gives poems titles like The Leisure of the Theory Class (on 'Professor Veblen, the last man who knew everything'), Lemon in Crinkly Paper (which has nothing to do with lemons, but does note that 'Milk always looks plentiful, being poured') and Anger, which asks an unidentified person, 'Why do you always have to start crying just after I start? / You always have to ruin it for me.'

Browsing readers will find their own gems, but should watch also for the family poems like Surgical Waiting Room, Keep Your Shoulders Back, Starting to Quit, Deviled Highway, Deathbed and a love poem to a dog called Samantha."