Poetry. BENT AT THE SPINE offers a "pronoun"-ced frolic where the "you" is a disconnected third party--the reader is left in the position of an eavesdropper, or a listener, or a karmasurplus author. Its relentless interrogation resonates at an invigorating pace: cultural difference, different bodies, diffident accents, deafening rhymes. Sometimes rapturous, often vulvy, the poems audaciously teach "you" how to read them, allowing the last-minute-cram-session to be a delving, a plunging, a repeating discovery."Nicole Markotic has created a work of extravagant speech in BENT AT THE SPINE. As her title implies, the book is broken, the back contorted, yet the body o f language is recombined in new and surprising forms. In the tradition of Gertrude Stein's TENDER BUTTONS or Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge Markotic's book offers the pleasures of close listening and uncanny seeing. Or as she might say, 'a nod's as wonky as a tight-lipped pucker.'"--Michael Davidson