<DIV><p>Genevieve Kaplan&rsquo;s <I>In the ice house</I> offers an innovative meditation on domestic life and the physical world that surrounds it, chronicling &ldquo;at least the beginnings of some disaster&rdquo; taking place in a landscape that &ldquo;had no symmetry.&rdquo; Deftly channeling poets like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, as well as invoking Kaplan&rsquo;s own distinct poetic sensibility, these poems reveal an atmospheric and wondrous world filled with odd and compelling images. Readers confront the menace of the ordinary, &ldquo;the whale-faced spout of the drainpipe, the cluck / of the chicken-bird&rdquo; and how &ldquo;the light attacks / the window and the stress of the shining / does not ease.&rdquo; The poet&rsquo;s insistent evocation of elemental images&mdash;the birds, the ice, the water&mdash;becomes almost incantatory, as the speaker seeks escape from &ldquo;the frantic outside&rdquo; she&rsquo;s trapped within. Kaplan&rsquo;s sky &ldquo;has the depth / of an ocean,&rdquo; and this book deeply articulates how &ldquo;silence is the only word that can replace loss.&rdquo; Moving artfully between internal desires and incisive observations of the external, these stunning poems radiate with both heat and ice.</p></DIV>