From Publishers Weekly
Masini is a poet of passion whose particularly American voice can be heard in the most unlikely of poetic settings. In this, her first book, she has chosen unlyrical urban spaces--basements, parking lots, a bandshell by a river--and transformed these landscapes with generosity and energy. Subterranean forces take part in the play of her imagery, and the writer controls their resonance. In "What Drives Her," for instance, a poem about a woman dancing, the process of memory is described in terms of surfacing: "Her father dances inside her, / a kind of dim, gritty music. / And her heart, her insistent heart, / floats up panting /as though shaken up / from a buried place." To Masini's credit, a reader may feel that some of the surfacing going on in these poems is still happening, that the poems are the byproducts of the process, or even the process itself. Her gaze is steady, whether looking at horror or beauty ("we learn to live in a torn place"); when evoking a place or a moment, she effectively mixes the mundane with the sublime, as in "Wheel of Fortune" (alluding both to the TV game show and to the Tarot's archetypal wheel of fortune). The choices she makes in her poems lead to brave and honest writing, even if formal considerations are sometimes sacrificed on the confessional altar. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Born and raised in New York's "outerboroughs," Masini vividly expresses her love of her native city in passionate, tough poems that recall the tonsile muscularity of Whitman, another indefatigable walker of the city's streets: "I knew brick and concrete, glass and lights,/ the diamond sidewalks that burned in the summers,/ the cement walk . . . slate blocks/ thrust up by the movement of trees." She also writes compellingly of her working-class immigrant background: her furnace repairman father, blackened by grease and soot; her alluring but volatile mother; her dying 92-year-old grandfather ("my grandfather is sleeping/ Basta./ Dormi in pace ora./ Dante. Recipes. Ave Maria." The appeal of this fine first collection, winner of the 1993 Barnard New Women's Poets Prize, is its intense clarity of language, which, like the city that inspired many of its poems, is gritty, complex, and always in motion. Highly recommended for collections of contemporary poetry.- Christine Stenstrom, Shea & Gould Law Lib., New YorkCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
Winner of the 1993 Barnard New Women Poets Prize.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Stark and sensual, energetic and intimate, That Kind of Danger explores the dangers, histories, and passions of the life of the city - from its violences to its surprising occasions of beauty. Donna Masini writes frankly, sometimes painfully, about sex, about working-class roots and immigrant experience, about the dangers and failures of family life, the architecture of desire, the dynamics of our erotic lives. With a driving music and often startling power, these poems are about the way lives are broken and rebuilt, the layers of history we are often oblivious to, the redemptive and transforming power of memory and imagination. Urgent, unwavering, this provocative debut volume ultimately celebrates the tentative yet joyful moments of transcendence and grace that seeing and naming render possible.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Masini is a poet of passion whose particularly American voice can be heard in the most unlikely of poetic settings. In this, her first book, she has chosen unlyrical urban spaces--basements, parking lots, a bandshell by a river--and transformed these landscapes with generosity and energy. Subterranean forces take part in the play of her imagery, and the writer controls their resonance. In ``What Drives Her,'' for instance, a poem about a woman dancing, the process of memory is described in terms of surfacing: ``Her father dances inside her, / a kind of dim, gritty music. / And her heart, her insistent heart, / floats up panting /as though shaken up / from a buried place.'' To Masini's credit, a reader may feel that some of the surfacing going on in these poems is still happening, that the poems are the byproducts of the process, or even the process itself. Her gaze is steady, whether looking at horror or beauty (``we learn to live in a torn place''); when evoking a place or a moment, she effectively mixes the mundane with the sublime, as in ``Wheel of Fortune'' (alluding both to the TV game show and to the Tarot's archetypal wheel of fortune). The choices she makes in her poems lead to brave and honest writing, even if formal considerations are sometimes sacrificed on the confessional altar. (Apr.)

Library Journal