The world that Donald Revell ponders in these poems replete with contrarieties. The same verbal playfulness and prophetic lyricism that made Revell a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and a winner of National Poetry Series, Pushcart, and PEN Center USA West awards are in full force in <em>Beautiful Shirt</em>. Here he traverses the rocky terrain of innocence, memory, disillusion, and salvation in a voice at once haunted and elliptical: “This is the world as I have known it./ It has a soft outline and is easily victimized.” Juxtaposed within a trio of long, introspective poems are shorter lyrics that push the limits of poetic syntaxes and dictions. In all, <em>Beautiful Shirt</em> searches for the true nature of the self through language unfettered by narrative constraints and conventional conceptual identities. <small>from Google Books</small>