SOURCE: "Try Bondage," in Kenyon Review, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 157-59.

[In the following excerpt, Svoboda observes of American Dreams, "These are not nice poems. But they are rarely not good poems."]

Every word costs in American Dreams, a High Risk book by Sapphire, published [in the United States] and in London. The title is the screen on which she projects both the shattering of those dreams and the dream of re-making them. The title poem yields yet another reading:

       The woman looked at me & hissed,
       "Stand up for the general!"
       I said, "My father's in the army, not me."
       & I remained seated.
       & throughout 38 years
       of bucking & winging
       grinning & crawling
       brown nosing & begging
       there has been a quiet
       10 year old in me
       who has remained seated.
       She perhaps is the real American Dream.
                                 ("American Dreams")

"Nobody said that what was cannot be changed," Sapphire writes in the...