LYNN EMANUEL gets right down to brass tacks in her latest book of poetry. She pokes the reader right in the eye, repeatedly, with her claw-like questions, probing the interdependence of writer and reader in pieces like "The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am a Poet," which does a pretty good job of characterizing the writer: "I prefer the cookbook to the actual meal. Feeling bores me. That's why I write poetry. In poetry you just give the instructions to the reader and say, 'Reader, you go on from here.' And what I like about poetry is its readers, because those are giving people. I mean, those are people you can trust to get the job done. They pull their own weight. If I had to have someone at my back in a dark alley, I'd want it to be a poetry reader."

Emanuel holds no truck with the uncomfortable politics of hard-working reader, working-class subjects, and the shit they've been served with the pompous spoon of Poetry with a capital "P." The subject is swiftly dealt a blow when Emanuel stomps all over Walt Whitman (praise Jesus!) in "Walt, I Salute You!":

"You, the sweat of their workers' brows! You, their hatred of poets!/You have been women! Women with white legs, women with black mustaches, /waitresses with their hands glued to their rags on the counter,/waitresses in Dacron who light up the room with their serious wattage./Yes! You are magically filling up, like milk in a glass, the white/nylon uniform, the blocky shoes with their slab of rubber sole!/Your hair is a platinum helmet. At your breast, a bouquet of rayon violets."

In her own homey language, Emanuel prefers to needle the reader into the poem. "As you are reading, you become the hard,/dark bulk looming at the end of a sentence," she writes in "The Book's Speech." While we, the readers, are pinned down, Emanuel flashes hilarious and vivid images at us.

A trench coat is "flabby, a coat with a lobotomy." Mustache references abound. She places blame for a poem on other poets: "gertrude stein has hijacked me.... This is what it feels like to be a huge typewriter in a dress." In the terribly self-conscious poem "Dressing the Parts," Emanuel mocks the smugness of writing: "So, here we are/I am a kind of diction/I can walk around in/clothed in the six-inch heels/of arrogation and scurrility." This intense and sophisticated collection pulses with intelligence and negativity, slams the reader onto the wrestling mat, and laughs through its bloodied nose and knocked-out teeth. Lynn Emanuel is a poet to be dealt with, and she delineates the terms.

Lynn Emanuel takes it to the mat on Sun Feb 27 at 3 p.m. at the Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030, free.