I loved the humor of that one enough to forget about my earlier feeling of being held at arm’s length, enough to identify with the speaker in “A Beautiful Lie” when he lists the things that “accumulate in our closet/until we’re too lazy to throw them away.” And after that, the next poem that really arrested my attention was the title one, “Missing You, Metropolis” which is a stunningly good poem that ends with “giving blood to fantasy.” Rub your finger over them, touch the deviled tongue.Ĭaress my fur with your skin, let me keep your body warm I felt more invited into poems like “The Golden Avenger,” when he says of the story:Īnd then I loved the blatant seduction of “Nightcrawler Buys a Woman a Drink,” which ends with: But that didn’t interfere too much with my enjoyment of the stanza in the poem “In a Conversation about Superheroes” where he reveals that his friends “groan when I say Storm” because “they know I’ve picked her/for her skin alone.” When I got to the second poem, though, entitled “Stuart,” I found that the speaker of the poems is holding me at arm’s length: Not a comic book reader myself, I understood the story from watching the recent Captain America movie, and so I could think “oh the pathos! Oh the comic condition!”

These are treats, delicious twenty-two-page

I fell head-over-heels in love with the very first poem, “The Secret Art of Reading a Comic (after Auden)” because of the way it echoes my favorite-well, surely almost everyone’s favorite- Auden poem: She requested a review of Gary Jackson’s 2010 volume entitled Missing You, Metropolis, with its comic-book-themed poems. My friend Alison, who is currently in a foreign country and doesn’t have the library access that I do–since I now go to work every day in an academic library-asked if I took review requests for poetry volumes.

Missing you metropolis