The Reversible Coat

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

These poems are witty, touching, and engaging. Krakofsky can write
evocatively about Jerusalem, about Toronto, and about Komoka, Ontario.
He can deal with Bat Mitzvahs, baseball games, Freud, and Joseph (two
Jewish dream-interpreters!) with equal ease. His stylistic range is not
as wide as his subject matter: he adheres too rigidly to the
short-lined, terse format so pervasive in contemporary poetry. As a
result, his poems sometimes seem notes for poems rather than finished
products. There is also a tendency to editorialize. Rage against
anti-Semitism is understandable, but in one case—“A Meal”—
Krakofsky’s judgment is seriously flawed. Anger at a blonde Lufthansa
flight attendant who pins a red flag to his seat to indicate that he
will receive a kosher meal leads to an extreme expression of a desire to
impose sex on her “without desire,” to “unload / six million
wasted sperms.” The flight attendant herself is a racial stereotype,
and the sentiment is disturbing. In “Northern Justice,” rage against
“Herr Zundel,” a convicted anti-Semitic writer, is properly
motivated. The ethnic dimensions of the poems, which are as often tender
as angry, give the book its rich particularity. Krakofsky’s marvelous
coinage for his “haiku schmaiku” deserves to be perpetuated. All in
all, a varied and highly readable collection.