"Apollonian bummer bumf"

Michael Lista's bracing review of Tim Lilburn's new book of poems, Assiniboia, should be required reading for anyone who still believes the canard that literary journalism has no business calling itself criticism:

"Once we start taking Lilburn as directed, though, we become acquainted with the deleterious side effects: dry mouth, bloating, the runs. For decades, Lilburn, a trained Jesuit, has been preaching his Gospel of Strangeness. In his book of essays Living in the World As If It Were Home, he famously wrote: “the world seen deeply eludes all names; it is not like anything else, it is not the sign of something else. It is itself. It is a towering strangeness.” One must appreciate how strange it is, if nothing else, for a poet to say that the world is not like something else, because that is what poetry is: anthropomorphizing nature by transubstantiating it into the most human elements—language and metaphor."

UPDATE: Bryan Sentes responds.