Review of PF Potvin's The Attention Lesson

at Matthew Thorburn's Now Then.

"Since these are prose poems, often of the somewhat surreal or comically askew variety, my first thought naturally was of James Tate -- except it turns out these poems aren't very Tate-like.

Potvin's prose poems are much more economical, number-of-words-wise, for one thing. More poem-like. Also they're less anecdotal; they tell stories, but they're doing more than that. For instance -- and this is what's most important to me -- there's art here at the level of the word and phrase that I admire."