“A prose sonnet is an object, like a porch or a painting,” writes Janet Kaplan in the prose sonnet “Applicants” in her third book of poetry, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist. “As a plus, one can place it on the porch or in a painting.” One gets the sense from reading the slim book that each poem is indeed a solid object to be pored over, placed on the porch, puzzled for meaning as one might do looking at an abstract painting. The poems, little truisms tucked into dream nutshells, fantasize the mundane (whether it be one’s meals or the passing of time or facts about Pinocchio: who, in 1936, was “depicted chained like a dog to a doghouse.”). Kaplan plunges us into an Alice-in-Wonderland world of absurdity compacted into neat prose poems, and in this form the absurdity transforms into the sensible.

Titles for the prose poems in Kaplan’s book are represented like the cork you put in at the very last part of the wine-making process – all the flavors of the words bottled up by the title, because these titles are placed at the end, and sometimes elicit meaning or context or a definition, a summary of the sweet grape of poetry you’ve just tasted. In the title poem, images of jellyfish and tree language bubble over the lines, and when you reach the title, placed at the end, you start to try and understand how those images relate to a dreamlife of a philanthropist. There is artistry to Kaplan’s language, and the great thematic presence of artistry, since many poems reference the visual arts. Hence, why she wrote that a prose sonnet could indeed be like a painting.

The “sonnets” are fourteen-lined prose sonnets, written as numbered lists, with the titles at the top, crowning the heads of the poems. The lines, numbered, are set apart from each other, given the distinction they so deserve. Kaplan forces us to rethink a sonnet as a form unconstrained by the corset of rhyme, but neatly dissected just the same. There is a balance between the cerebral and the intimate. I do remain uncertain as to why these pieces are called sonnets, but I nonetheless appreciate their list form.

In “Travelogue,” each line of the sonnet reads like a well-scripted travel Tweet – succinct, vibrant, like the moments of travel that one might not capture in film, but which sit in the folds of the labyrinthine brain, waiting to be scouted out and mulled over. Take, for example, line 6: “A city of street people, their smell of moldy honey.” Kaplan gives us plenty to mull over and does so concisely, conscious of our technologically obsessed reading brains that focus on blogs and Twitter and online journals rather than printed books. She explores this idea of new media in her poem, “Hyper Text,” where words like “the streets” and “figurines” are underlined, meant to be hyperlinked to ideas beyond the printed page.

Kaplan’s sensory imagery, bold metaphors and “fist pumping” language awaken one’s senses, and compel a reader to read just one more poem, until – suddenly – you have reached the end, “Marginalia.” And at the end, “Essential now is this narrow margin of light surrounding you, where your life begins or ends,” and Kaplan has strung you along, revealing fragments of light, shards of a life, stitched into prose poems, “and you, rising in your netherworld, singing.” Kaplan ushers us into a dreamlife of words, one that still haunts me after I’ve put the book down. 

Or maybe it’s the giant ant on the cover that haunts my netherworld.