Mary Jo Salter s sparkling new collection, Open Shutters, leads us into a world where things are often not what they seem. In the first poem, Trompe l Oeil, the shadow-casting shutters on Genoese houses are made of paint only, an open lie. And yet Who needs to be correct / more often than once a day? / Who needs real shadow more than play?
Open Shutters also calls to mind the lens of a camera in the villanelle School Pictures or in the stirring sequence In the Guesthouse, which, inspired by photographs of a family across three generations, offers at once a social history of...