Poetry Project Newsletter, April-June 2007 (#211, pp. 25-26)   CHARLES BERNSTEIN GIRLY MAN UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS I 2006 REVIEW BY CHUCK STEBELTON   Charles Bernstein's new volume Girly Man, richly furnished in hard- cover with a gorgeously rendered Susan Bee dust jacket, cites the original chapbook publication of two chapters as pamphlets rather than chaps. By calling them pamphlets, which call to mind slogans, Bernstein suggests that he intended to affect an immediate outcome beyond a beautiful book object or a cannonball in the gift economy. The individual poems take on necessarily different resonances than when read against the primary context in which they first appeared. Some take on multiple registers, others seem more muted here. Many, thankfully, find complement elsewhere in a growing number of sound files and critical responses on the author's EPC page and at Penn Sound.   Girly Man’s opening chapter appeared with Chax in 2003, lovingly hand sewn with a spiffy little woodcut figure thinking a speech bal- loon that says, "Let's Just Say." The book-ending of first and final pieces allow each of the four poems here to make fullest use of the smaller format. Both the opening poem "In Particular" and the final untitled poem "every lake has a house" proceeds as a list of impos- sibly shifting positions, each ending on an inversion of the opening line. In the case of "In Particular," "A black man waiting at a bus stop / A white woman sitting on a stool" cap a four page litany of impolitic characters and caricatures. “A Wiccan matron swimming in glue. A balding brownnoser in tutu.” The poem comes into its own the moment it returns to what' it first meant to dodge: " A white man sitting on stooll A black woman waiting at bus stop."   The short untitled poem "every lake has a house" frames the same trick in the shorter space of a single page. Bernstein inverts its title line by closing on "& every house has a lake." In the process he pro- ceeds to zoom in on that house and every house to a level of improb- able and even impossible detail: "& every face has a thought / & every thought has a trap." Given four poems in a single package, this bracketing by inversion is a send up at the level of the poem and on the level of sequence. At the opening of this larger collection, the tone leading chapter "Let'sJust Say" wants to contain each impulse the rest of the collection's poems will follow or else slyly resist. One of the impulses in Girly Man is to have fun at the expense of facts that aren't logically necessary. The two part "Language, Truth, and Logic" is a hoot, insisting as always that there's no need to be too precious. Longer poems that resist this same impulse, take "Likeness" with its "The repetition is like the repetition," a real groaner, can come off as mere scores.   The most topical section is "Some Of These Daze," composed oflet- ters and notes from late 2001. There's a strong sense of family and neighbor. Mostly comInitment and aftermath: "It's a bit ominous," a friend writes, "the way the politicos are speaking about talking with one voice." --I am just trying to get by talking with no voice."   Other sections strike a bemused, comic tone and document the sense of a poet very much of his own time. "He's So Heavy, He's My Soka1l" is a wry performance in itself: "I'm laughing so hard I could sigh." Throughout Girly Man Bemstein is at play with thinking and this leads him to coin what could immediately become a new slo- gan: "War is the extension of prose by other means." Chuck Stebelton is the author of Circulation Flowers (Tougher Disguises) and works as Literary Program Manager at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee.