Publisher's Weekly
Chatty and whimsical, literary and (at its best) laugh-out-loud funny, Hamby's fourth outing begins with a tour-de-force: monorhyme. All the long lines in Hamby's two-page Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties that Plague Me Like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory (yes, that's the title) rhyme, or at least half-rhyme, with one another: Who are you? Not the hippie chick/ of your early twenties or the Sears and Roebuck/ Christian judge your mother became, though Satan still stalks/ you.... Most of the volume pursues the same jittery, entertaining pace, with frequent reference to baby-boom–era popular culture, especially film: Here's to the movie queens with their nose jobs, snow jobs, blow jobs. Long-lined Odes, most in monorhyme or in loose couplets, give her extroverted, digressive imagination free play.