Alex Grant		“beginning poet Critique”     Dear poet – a few notes on your poem “Tammy of Troy.” The sky can be bruised, heedless, leaden, etc. – but I’m having trouble with “pump-action.”  A word on poignancy – rusting swing-sets, faded photographs and the like are pretty failsafe – I’m not convinced your expired restraining order plays quite so well. The nipple reference is usually a can’t-miss, but might work harder here without actually mentioning the grease-gun. Sapphic nods are generally fine, though “hot lesbo action” may be a wee bit explicit for our readership – just a thought. Classical references can be effective(Greek is best,) though I don’t recall Menelaus                                                                ever holding up a liquor-store, and I believe Archimedes invented the planetarium, but I don’t think the Veg-o-matic was one of his. While it’s commonly accepted that hemorrhoids were indeed a problem at that time, I felt that dedicating three stanzas to the topic was perhaps overkill. On your shift from classical to modern – deftly handled, though I felt you could lose the time-machine and still pull it off.             Good luck placing this elsewhere. (Finalist, 2005 James Hearst Poetry Prize - appeared in North American Review, 2006)		The steps of Montmartre   - after Brassai’s 1936 photograph   On the steps of Sacre Coeur    Cathedral, in that same winter       when junge leute filled Bavarian   beer-gardens, ten years before    Adorno proclaimed that there      could be no art after Auschwitz,   Brassai captured his flawless    image. Through the tunnel     formed by the parting trees,   battalions of lamp-posts advance   and retreat in the morning mizzle,      clamp chain-link handrails hard   into sunwashed cobbles. In less   than a year, the corpseless heads     on Nanking’s walls will coalesce   with Guernica’s ruined heart, mal    du siècle will become Weltschmerz,        and the irresistible symmetry   of a million clacking bootheels     will deafen half a continent.        The red brush never dries -   adagio leads finally to fugue,   haiku to satori, and the image                  fixed in silver to remembering.  (Finalist, 2006 Sow's Ear Poetry Review Contest. Selected by Natasha Trethewey for inclusion in Best New Poets 2007)