Loose Sugar. Brenda Hillman

<P>Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised – love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar – are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold, but into a poet's philosopher's stone, in which language marries life. </P><P>Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual heading (such as «space / time» or «time / work») in which the terms are neither in collision nor collusion, but in conversation. It's elemental sweet talk, and is Brenda Hillman's most experimental work to date, culminating in a meditation on the possibility of a native – and feminine – language.</P>