Allegory of the Supermarket

Stephanie Brown offers a hint of something curiously ominous through the sly epigraph she chooses from Henry James—"The amount of thought they give to their clothing, the people who are afraid of looking frivolous!" But we should already have known something unsettling was about to happen from this book's title, which suggests the devastating playfulness at work in these poems. One poem deals with vacationing librarians: "it's not so simple that we're prim and went to the exotic / Though perhaps that's what the story really is." What the story "really is" is sometimes what it seems but with a twist; and it is sometimes so ironically envisioned you would hardly believe this was California. These poems are indeed allegorical, but this is a thoroughly modern allegory dealing with a frighteningly up-to-date set of situations.