Boomerangs in the Living Room

Rex Wilder’s second collection introduces the world to a new form: the boomerang, a four-line nouveau haiku, an anti-Tweet that aims for permanence in an evanescent world. These “admirable throwaways” (so nicknamed by Richard Wilbur, who advised the author on their shape) must rhyme the first word or syllable with the last. The opening salvo must suggest a coda, the bullet must return to its chamber. In the process, the poem moves like a boomerang: according to Wilbur, “a thrown boomerang has three phases: it flies to first base (as it were), then travels over to third and rises, then swoops home.” Boomerangs in the Living Room catches in its sweep literature’s classic themes: love, death, family, sex. The poems that come swooping back are seductive, destructive, endlessly quotable, and heartbreakingly beautiful.