Hooking

The poet’s fifth collection is a series of centos that, on one level, draw inspiration from a traditional Newfoundland craft. Like a hooked rug made up of strips of fabric cut from old clothes, the cento is stitched together from lines scissored out of other poems. Dalton’s centos range across continents and epochs, rummaging among poems contemporary and canonical in celebration of the combinatory energies of language. As her lines hook together syntactically and emotionally, they create a striking music, by turns subtle, startling, and dazzling.