Bactra Review    The Transmutation Notebooks

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Becker and her publisher call the pieces of the book poems, so I do too, but --- to be both philistine and churlish --- I am far from clear about what makes them so. To be more concrete and operational, why print the text with the line-breaks it has, rather than with justified margins? Some of the lines wobble around twelve syllables, but don't appear to scan, and the length of lines varies with no purpose that I can detect. This could, I suppose, be some sort of statement about the randomness of variation, but Becker, thankfully, seems much too straightforward for such preening slyness.