Red Trousseau is the latest work from one of America's greatest modern poets. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Carol Muske has discovered a way to work magic within the boundaries of technical achievement ... Her contemplation of experience is personal yet moves further, into the spiritual and philosophical; then it be longs not only to the poet but to all of us.
The poems in Red Trousseau use Los Angeles as a symbol for the seduction of appearances; reality crosses from the Wallace Stevens notion of the sun in "Red Trousseau," "hovering in its guise of impatient tribunal," to the sun in "Unsent letter." in which a director reshoots a tarnished sunset so that "the scene, infinite, rebegins" In Muskes poems primary colors dominate, most notably red-the red of Salem burnings, the self-immolation of a political dissident in Prague, and Eros itself, moving like a red shadow over the body of love Stylistically brilliant and emotionally resonant, the poems in Red Trousseau display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft.
