SORE THROAT, his second collection, come out of self-imposed semiotic limitation, yet manifest a fully inhabited psychological environment. Working with a limited vocabulary—200 words derived from a nervous habit of transcription—and with specific source texts—Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande—Kunin makes hymn, epigram, ode, elegy, ballad, conversation, invective, confession, epitaph, inability, protest, love poem, (praise, valentine, aubade, seduction, defense of inconstancy), riddle, cosmogony, theodicy, vanity, and misplaced concreteness among his modes d'emploi. Combining rigorous formal procedure with a kind of automatic writing, THE SORE THROAT produces poems of unlikely, and heightened, sensitivity to nuances of feeling.

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