From Publishers Weekly
A third of this biography-in-verse skirts the gifted doctor cum playwright to serve instead as a primer on political strife in 19th-century Russia and a condensed retelling of facts done up in funny line breaks ("and the ghastly geekiness/ of the state bureaucracy"). Chekhov's early years get surprisingly short shrift: 44 words are given to the childhood event that led him into medicine. Only when we get to the adult artist is our attention finally aroused, as Sanders, while relating Chekhov's rationalizing away of tuberculosis, a research visit to Siberia and the albatross of censorship, finally breathes bloody life into his subject. Too rarely, however, does the poet enter Chekhov's mind; rather he works from the outside in, via scholarly details and letter excerpts. Sanders's career has been firmly rooted in the Beat movement?it's easy to understand his love of a great writer in a time of revolution. Less comprehensible is the lack of creativity that accompanies much of this work; and often silly is the occasional toke of Beat lingo, as when the toil of creating Uncle Vanya is described as "batter/ for the Divine Waffle." Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Writer, perf-po (performing poet), and founding member of the 1960s poets' rock group the Fugs, Sanders has now created his own genre, the perf-po verse biography. First subject: the great Russian playwright and story writer Anton Chekhov. It's a highly readable work, beautiful as poetry, accessible as prose, that succeeds brilliantly in telling Chekhov's complex, fascinating life story: childhood in Taganrog, double career as hack journalist and respected physician, rise to a place of honor among Russian writers, and tragic early death from tuberculosis. Structured as a series of short, self-contained poems, many only a few lines long, the intelligent, well-researched work includes considerable discussion of nineteenth-century European history and provides some surprisingly detailed information about the social, political, and intellectual phenomena of Chekhov's Russia: Czar Alexander II's attempts to liberalize (which foundered after his assassination), his son Nicholas I's subsequent reactionary and repressive regime, and the myriad Russian secret societies, all pushing for revolution of some kind. Jack Helbig

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A third of this biography-in-verse skirts the gifted doctor cum playwright to serve instead as a primer on political strife in 19th-century Russia and a condensed retelling of facts done up in funny line breaks (``and the ghastly geekiness/ of the state bureaucracy''). Chekhov's early years get surprisingly short shrift: 44 words are given to the childhood event that led him into medicine. Only when we get to the adult artist is our attention finally aroused, as Sanders, while relating Chekhov's rationalizing away of tuberculosis, a research visit to Siberia and the albatross of censorship, finally breathes bloody life into his subject. Too rarely, however, does the poet enter Chekhov's mind; rather he works from the outside in, via scholarly details and letter excerpts. Sanders's career has been firmly rooted in the Beat movementit's easy to understand his love of a great writer in a time of revolution. Less comprehensible is the lack of creativity that accompanies much of this work; and often silly is the occasional toke of Beat lingo, as when the toil of creating Uncle Vanya is described as ``batter/ for the Divine Waffle.'' (July)

BookList - Jack Helbig

Writer, perf-po (performing poet), and founding member of the 1960s poets' rock group the Fugs, Sanders has now created his own genre, the perf-po verse biography. First subject: the great Russian playwright and story writer Anton Chekhov. It's a highly readable work, beautiful as poetry, accessible as prose, that succeeds brilliantly in telling Chekhov's complex, fascinating life story: childhood in Taganrog, double career as hack journalist and respected physician, rise to a place of honor among Russian writers, and tragic early death from tuberculosis. Structured as a series of short, self-contained poems, many only a few lines long, the intelligent, well-researched work includes considerable discussion of nineteenth-century European history and provides some surprisingly detailed information about the social, political, and intellectual phenomena of Chekhov's Russia: Czar Alexander II's attempts to liberalize (which foundered after his assassination), his son Nicholas I's subsequent reactionary and repressive regime, and the myriad Russian secret societies, all pushing for revolution of some kind.

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