In her first collection of poems, United Artists, forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press, S. X. Rosenstock has created her own quirky nomenclature of experience, her own wise-cracking erotics of art, by rummaging through what she calls the "troves of culture's treasures." She presents a verbal universe where artists are antically united, where the spirit sashays forth and the sidestreets of excess -- filled with wild signs and clamorous voices, with imaginative roads not taken -- all turn up at the palace of wisdom.

Rosenstock's poems have a certain baroque giddiness that I find funny and beguiling. They go too far and are almost always over-the-top. She is a compulsive punner who plays with language until it yields something spooky. She loves verbal textures and elaborate surfaces, coined and recondite words, babytalk, strange allusions. And she has a breezy insouciance before masterpieces and monuments (see "Coole Jerk," for example, which lovingly picks up -- and picks on -- poems by W. B. Yeats and William Meredith). One of her favorite tactics is to encounter various emblematic and out-of-the-way figures at odd angles and crossroads: "Aubrey Beardsley On the Subject of His Own Willful Ignorance of the Caprichos of Francisco Goya," for instance, or "John Fowler Thinking of Pinking Pure Silk Taffeta Triangles On Behalf of Pauline de Rothschild." "To make free with culture is perhaps the last action of Eros to be exploited by a member of our society," Richard Howard writes in a perspicacious note to Rosenstock's collection: "These poems are surely the most affectionately aimed spitballs ever lobbed into the courts of High Culture."