Wagner's poetry caught my eye because I found the most entertaining. Although they seemed overly constructed, they were still clever. I especially liked her poem "Coming and I did not Run Away". I liked how she started with real German words and then progressed rapidly to imitations of them. I also liked the use of self-awareness in the poems. I thought it worked well in "Among the Orders". Wagner comments on how whatever happens in a poem, it happens mainly because the poet wants to find out what would happen if two things are thrown together.
The one thing that bothered me about the poems were that they seemed very... constructed. I wish I had a better word for this, but I can't think of one. What I mean is, I get the sense in some of the lines that things are being thrown in there just because the poet knows they will catch attention, and she is deliberately trying to be "edgy". One example of this is the vulgarity. I don't have a problem with vulgarity in poems, but here it just seems unnecessary. Like the two homeless people could easily have been doing something besides "fucking". I think Wagner even comments on this herself in "Coming and I did not Run Away". After she randomly throws in the uterus, she even says "I saw the 'usual turn of phrase'/ coming and I did not run away/ I lay around". It sounds to me like she was writing a perfectly good poem, then some random line popped into her head and she just put it down, even though it had nothing to do with the poem. It just felt lazy to me.
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