Well, my friend Ron Kolm hated this book, but I didn't think it was so bad. I showed it to Ron in the back room of Muldoon's Pub on East 43rd Street, and he showered it with disdain; he was incensed. Fault Tree is the work of a young Californian language poet named Kathryn Pringle. Like most of its genre, it is a poetry of fracture, mystery, and inflection; the question with such verse, which tends towards the inscrutable and random-seeming, is whether it hangs together tightly enough to transcend its opacity. I think these poems do some of the time, but just barely. The general effect is one of philosophical concerns shattered and made ethereal and jangled -- "The precision of my rigid body in motion / has been mathematically proven" -- and of sinister totalitarian paranoia run rampant, fueled by psychotropic drugs and hallucinations of violence, of "a love / poem with blood and snow." The end result is diffuse but intermittently evocative. ( )