Deviants is about transgression and transcendence, about passing as a man or a woman, as gay or straight, about passing through unseen, passing by without stopping to help, passing over the threshold, passing from innocence, passing from life.
The deviants in this book are the many masks we wear, the loners and flirts, the worriers and snarlers; they can be found in the deviant use of ancient forms. These poems are beautiful and meaningfully interactive, clear and accessible on their own, but become even richer in meaning as they are understood in the context of poetic tradition. Kline’s words stick both in the mind and the craw.
They engage powerfully with tradition while deviating into contemporary concerns in a contemporary idiom, while challenging the easy relationship between speaker and reader through the use of shifting personae whose designs on the reader are slippery and sometimes adversarial, in the tradition of Browning, Pound, and Plath.