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Welcome to the 21st century, courtesy of Rachel Loden, whose first book of poems, "Hotel Imperium," is filled with ghostly -- and ghastly -- mementos from the past century. If you think the violence is over, however, you're wrong. It's goodbye Cold War, hello hideous global underbelly.

As Loden puts it,

Love, revenge, remaindering ...
is this the end?
-- The world pumps on,
with all its gently pitiless muzak.

Inspired by everything from Lenin's corpse to the fate of Ronald Reagan's overcoat, Loden makes the fragmentation and senselessness that are the 20th century's legacy dance with a kind of macabre glee. Even the King can't dodge her bullet; it turns out there's another man named Elvis Presley buried somewhere in this fine land of ours, and Loden brings the two together in a prose poem. "Who was this guy? We can confabulate something of his mother's state of mind from his date of birth, 10/24/57, after EP #1 left for Hollywood but before he went into the army." This is, of course, mind-boggling -- another Elvis Presley? -- but to Loden it's just one more piece of millennial fallout, and she uses it to call into question our illusions about clean slates. Sure, it's a new century, but that doesn't mean the old one, with all its confusions, is simply going to fade from our collective unconscious.

"Hotel Imperium" By Rachel Loden University of Georgia Press, 64 pages "Ocean Avenue" By Malena Morling New Issue Press, 75 pages

Instead, it's all about making intelligent transitions from one era to the next. Writing about a model in a 1960s lingerie ad, Loden comments: "She is ether/air. See how she struts/her stuff ..." The poem next moves on to genuine celebrity:

Liz Taylor

and her honeymooning breasts
lie out with Eddie on a beach

in France, but do we care
about these fleshpots

of the idle rich? Their tongues
are dust. A cleavage opens

between what we crave
and what we (bluntly)

are. Which is, perhaps, to say
that our unsullied heroine

is just where we would
want her, out of touch,

the eighteen hour support she
promised but a ruse.

By the time another generation rolls around, the rules will have changed for the better. False ideals with be replaced with honesty, vulgar as it may be. Loden deftly catches the shift, pinpointing its inception in a brilliant choice of spokeswoman: "Madonna's still/a glint of silver/in her father's eye," she writes, and then, looking back at that '60s lingerie ad one more time, "Our girl/is not material. Ours/is a wind, a slitted/sheath, a lie." (Of course, Madonna was more than a glint by the '60s, having been born in '59.)

No one, however, is a more insistent presence here than Richard Nixon, who turns up in "Hotel Imperium" as relentlessly and with as much audacity as he did in life. His face even appears on the cover of the book, and Loden has written an entire poem composed of words from his last will and testament.

What is this obsession all about? Perhaps the answer lies in "Bride of Tricky D," where Loden seems to be mourning the loss of the only man dastardly enough to guide her through the next millennium. Imagining him rising from the grave to squire her, she writes:

... it's so deadly smug out on the new

world order battlements. "Let's slip the Constitution, Richard,

cut the red ribbon on the virgin
century. Teach me tonight ..." I find

his fierce beard lovely and the shadows
long. Asleep with Pat and Checkers

by his side ... "We could do it," he'll say, "but it would be wrong."

Indeed. But maybe all Rachel Loden wants is to make sure nothing and no one, not even Tricky Dick or the man who built him a bowling alley in the White House, is forgotten. After all, as she writes so eloquently in "Carnal Acknowledgments," "there is no suffering so great that human minds cannot transform it into some kind of spiritual stretching exercise or wretched experiment. And we want a Greek chorus the way we wanted someone to watch us learn to walk, we want miles and miles of microfiche and jars of crumbling papyrus."

Next page | Malena Mörling's "Ocean Avenue": Worldly wisdom, delivered with a hazy magic