Worries

Alexander Motyl's second collection of poems combines odes to people-ranging from the B-movie star Sterling Hayden to Fred and Ginger to the Andy Warhol Superstar Ultra Violet to the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-with wry, ironic, and occasionally mordant observations about life, death, time, art, war, and other worrisome things. Throughout, Motyl verges between hope and despair, though ultimately coming down on the side of the former. Unsurprisingly, the poems are seriously unserious or unseriously serious: the author isn't quite sure which...WORRIES is a companion piece of his first poetry collection, Vanishing Points.