The poetry of James Tate (The Government Lake) lands like a perfectly wrapped gift for those who love words and love the way images can take flight in unexpected and hilarious ways. The editors of Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate--Dara Barrois/Dixon, Emily Pettit, and Kate Lindroos--know it and offer this collection of his work, complete with a stunning foreword by poet Terrance Hayes. Hayes spins Tate's own words into newfound gold, weaving them throughout as he explains the "defamiliarizing feel" and the way the "subtextual pang you find in a Jim Tate line, a deadpan panic, creeps into the echoes." This set of 52 poems opens with "Goodtime Jesus," which concludes with the line used as the book's title, and from there the collection unfurls, one brilliant, comically absurd poem after another.
Tate's poems have an improv quality, with fully realized characters "yes and"-ing their way through every line. Take, for example, "A Largely Questioning Article Offering Few Answers." In this poem, Roberta arrives home from the hospital, tearfully explaining that the doctor had died: "When he entered Mother's room he was so startled he had a/ heart attack." The exchange that follows builds absurdity upon absurdity but always makes a strange sort of sense. Readers will delight at the humor and marvel at the quiet insights; both things are often crowded against each other, as seen in "My Felisberto:" "But there is a place for darkness and obscurity/ without which life can sometimes seem too much,/ too frivolous and too profound simultaneously." --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian