In Infamous Landscapes, Prageeta Sharma approaches the project of writing with ambivalence and irony. The poet voices her desire “to be a poet all of the time,” though she also confesses that “a poet is a voyeur out to steal the reckonings or outcomes of other people’s lives” (23, 59). Such uncertainty and indecision pervade this collection and serve as the locus of its intellectual energy.

Sharma presents a world of fragmentation, confusion, and mistrust—a world her poems seek to penetrate through a linguistic candor that itself “arrived after years of mistrust” (1). Her language is introspective and pensive; it offers the reader personal musings often jaded with a powerful wit. Most of the poems within this collection possess a narrative apparatus, though they tell only indistinct slivers of stories. The reader leaves each poem not with a landscape, but with a personalized mindscape in which the poet considers biography, experience, thought, perspective, and their chaotic interactions.

Although Infamous Landscapes privileges a confessional style of candid (though oftentimes sardonic) reflection over highly symbolic or imagistic language, its poems shimmer with powerful observations of both the speaker’s psyche and her surrounding world. The depiction of New Yorkers as “fussy with judgment and fuzzy with fabric” in “Escape,” the speaker’s self-conception as “an affectionate existentialist hanging on to the ropes” in “A Long Mating Season,” and her considerations of a “heavy” world in which “culture meets the complicity of cost” in “Forgotten and Forgetting” provide examples of the poet’s incisive eye (3, 6, 47).

The collection presents itself as a study in landscape “external and internal, cast in hysterics and hermeneutics.” Yet the pieces least in need of hermeneutical explication shine forth as both the most engaging poems and the poems most rich in hermeneutical potential. “After the Weekend With Geniuses” may be the least syntactically complex and most intellectually cogent work in the collection. It does not, like so many other poems in Infamous Landscapes, become muddled in the hysterical confusion of intractable (and often obscurely private) associations. Instead, it presents a gripping intellectual, psychological, and aesthetic vision. The work arrests the reader on first reading as disturbing and consequential. It compels him to re-enter the poem, to consider the subtleties and peculiarities of its construction, and to engage the text exegetically.

Likewise, the volume’s closing piece, “Background,” provides a poignant reflection on ambivalence and confusion that commands, rather than demands, exegesis. It begins with the realization that “thinking is always a bit uncomfortable” and proceeds to explore a self that laments how other people “learn the truth,” how other people “mine the importance of, the value in, great books” while the speaker “can’t reach the shelf” (62). Despite such alienation, the speaker understands that she is “the recipient” of everything done by writers and thinkers past who “participated in a whole era” and “made history” (62). The poem (and thus the volume) concludes with the tormented ambivalence that pervades the collection. The speaker “despises” many of these history-making minds, but the act of reading confounds her. She concedes: “I don’t know if I am fighting my impulses to join them” (62).

Infamous Landscapes suffers at times from opacity. Its “opaque” poems portray hysteria through inscrutable associations. The reader, often burdened by confusing syntax, struggles to find any coherence in such pieces. He reads and rereads but the recordings on the page remain discrete, their relationships impenetrably arbitrary. These pieces are not hermeneutical, and in ironic consequence, resist interpretation.

Sharma’s work, like the art pondered in her poem “The Flowers,” is both “so decorative” and “so scribbled” (19). Nevertheless, Infamous Landscapes contains many gems, and I enjoyed the book for its numerous moments of poignancy. It promises a compelling read, particularly for those who enjoy chaos, irony, ambivalence, or the existential struggles of an individual who seeks to understand a tremendously complex, fragmented, and phantasmal world—a world suffused with people “fussy with judgment and fuzzy with fabric” (3).