Fast, obsessive, jumpy, tender, and joyful, the poems in Wayne Koestenbaum's
Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background
take his signature themes—stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation—and cut them into serial strips: tidbits that employ techniques of pointillism, mosaic, grid, aphorism, litany, and philosophical investigation.
The luminaries in this memory-theater range from Yvonne de Carlo to Hannah Arendt. A trip to Venice and an invocation to an eschatological ice-cream man are the two longest trysts in a book exquisitely composed of "bits" that betoken a new brutalism in a writer known for svelte cadences and artful dodges.