Tender Agencies

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan and président, La Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

Dennis Denisoff is a novelist (Dog Years, Arsenal Pulp Press) and an
anthologist (Queeries). In Tender Agencies, his poetry “just dances
rings around the grammar!”—a statement the author has himself
pre-packaged with quotation marks within one of his poems. It is poetry
that plays a lot with words and letters; for example,
“A-Agency-Agents” in “Proxy” (from which, one gathers, he may
have drawn the title for the whole volume). It is poetry that also leans
heavily on its visual image on the page. At its best (as in “He sang
him”), the result is a piling up of words and images in the style of
Ionesco or Apollinaire.