Milton Acorn's The Brain's the Target … deserves the place of hour among Ryerson Press's current crop of chapbooks…. Mr. Acorn's work has been getting better and better during the past five years, and he seems about to become a very convincing and solid writer indeed. Such "solidity" is most obvious in his habits of speech—in the crushed rhythms, heavy alliterations, and words like boulders which have become his trademark…. The verse wrests whatever freedom it has from a rhythm of hard blows against an unyielding texture. But for Mr. Acorn society too is a dialectic of will and resistance; only here the struggle can be mutually destructive. As in that T.V. ringside poem "The Fights," "the brain's the target," whittled away until nothing human is left. I wish that Ryerson (or the author) had seen fit to represent the poet of society and the poet of...