A kind of "public dreaming" takes place via the music of these poems--a music as likely to visit the long-dead ghosts of the Kwakiutl tribe as Gianni Versace, and as interested in the baby
seat of a car as it is in a boxing ring. Building on the critical success of David Rivard's two earlier, award-winning books, Bewitched Playground widens both his emotional aperture
and formal range. Rivard calls it "my book of domestic voodoo"--not a book about having a child, but written out of a life touched by a new intimacy, and tuned-in to an unwilled
strangeness, a fluctuating gravity.
Here, the unconscious forces of the imagination intersect with the everyday, in a crossroads at the bewitched playground. These stylistically innovative poems are full of the rediscovery that
the world teems with "otherness," with freshness and surprise.