All-Night Lingo Tango

As the poet has discovered for herself, NOTHING succeeds like excess. Her poems have taught me how to be happy while hysterical, or even just how to be hysterical without tears. Who else could get me there so fast, so far, so fastidious? Seriously, the All-Night Lingo Tango is the way out even before dark, and I cherish every disyllabic slur: baa baa, Barbara, have you any bull? The answer is yes sir, yes sir, nobody's fool.

With its hyperintensity of imagery, humor, and substance sustained throughout, All Night Lingo Tango is a whirling genius of a book.

Chatty and whimsical, literary and (at its best) laugh-out-loud funny.

Strap on your dancing shoes before opening Barbara Hamby's fourth collection 'All-Night Lingo Tango.' The language is lush and erotic, as Hamby trips from one allusion and image to another so fast the reader is left breathless and giddy.

Swiveling, strumming, and slicing through air like an intimate Alvin Ailey ensemble, Hamby exhales a world the shape of associated conditions and intimate emotions out of her carefully chosen words. The poems are individually stunning. Collected together, they dance.

Reading Barbara Hamby is like savoring a fine multi-course meal. Her poems are thick and meaty, filled with savory details, but full of subtle nuances only realized on multiple reads. She fuses humor, pop culture, literature, travel, and romance in an ebullient mix.

Barbara Hamby triple-somersaults, dives, flips, and swings from rung to rung high over our heads on the flying trapeze. . . . Don't miss [All-Night Lingo Tango] . . . It's a perfect gift to yourself.

Combines an intense love affair with language and a consideration of it.Throughout the collection, Hamby has enormous fun with the English language. . . .Anyone who has contemplated fear; had a comment to make about war or religion; is passionate about cake; enjoys music, words, and sound; and keeps pluging at life as best as possible, with a brilliant vitality is a peer of Hamby's, and will laugh, think, and tap toes in rhythm to her book.

There are two things that give these poems artistic, intellectual, and emotional ballast. First, Hamby's range of allusion brings the world of American popular culture into contact with a larger artistic world that enriches both . . . Second and just as important is Hamby's use of poetic form.