Mean
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Space Race
Mean
Mean, Part Two
Medium Intense Red Copper
Rocket
Loose
Heat Wave
Hart Crane Slept Here
Four
London (1987)
Wrecking
Three Days of the Condor
The Glass Show Lounge
Bakasana
Deal
I’m sorry I was blind
Hover
Intention (The Dead Leaves)
Gain
Spring Fling
New World
Laurel
Replacement Monkey
Spirit
Proximity
Juju’s Sister
Gun Dog
Flower Girl
Park Bench
Perhaps this verse would please you better—Sue—(2)
Prosthetic
Garden Variety
For God’s Sake, Get Out
Route
1652
Graphic Novel Romance (V for Vendetta)
Ghost Squad
Hips
1971
Port of Los Angeles
Taking it like a little soldier, aren’t you?
Fortune-Telling
Gardena Freeway, California
Notes
“Atkinson is as comfortable riffing on pop culture as she is on Cicero, John Milton, and Herodotus, all of whom show up in her poems. But this is not showing off. Rather, these bits and pieces—unexpected, at times half-remembered, only give more weight to her experience, a heady mix of ideas and influences that reverberates like memory in the mind.”
“What I love about the ferociously efficient poems in Colette Atkinson’s Mean is how paradoxically generous they are. Dead-set against sweetness, they seek to make of ‘mean’ a term of hard-won praise. In the stories they tell about our helter-skelter, contradictory wanting, they pursue the mean-streak that keeps us honest, that keeps us going after what we want, even if or especially when it means breaking what we thought we wanted.”
“The poems in Colette LaBouff Atkinson’s Mean blend high culture, pop culture, and pathos. As a writer of lean prose poems that are technically masterful but never fussy, LaBouff Atkinson is also a storyteller of contemporary America: its influences by both John Milton and The Amityville Horror. Her keen eye for detail entertains and informs the reader while she spins a tale of mixed emotions, family history, love, loss, and solitude: an accurate record of the way we live today.”
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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