Jim Feast’s modern, urban “Tintern Abbey,” “looking up,/ ignorantly expecting stars/ in a sky/ long ago corrected/ of light,” reprises a history recollected in turmoil and rapture (“O love, I am a gazelle,/ paused in the shoestrings of darkness.”) A record of love, feasting (pun strictly accidental) and labor struggle of the poet’s 1970s young manhood reflect the tutelage of Lady Bunny, not New York’s drag luminary of the same name but a multimedia artist who once held sway over a significant portion of Chicago’s counterculture, preaching a devout trust in chaos and the need to see every familiar experience with fresh eyes. He sends several nods to the example of Hart Crane.

Nothing wrong with basing your art on a set of theories, but it helps when your special, personal talent can give it flesh.

Feast blends his individual accounts with the distinctive voices of the persons who pass through his days and nights across the class spectrum, as partially filtered through his branded meters. His line surfs on a frictionless glide that yields a soft, unerring surprise on every break, with occasional adept riffs on sonnet, ballad and blues forms.

In a more condensed version of looking back, Susan C. Weiman’s Roommates presents the standard disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction,” followed by the advisory, “Any resemblance to actual persons…is purely coincidental.” At the same time, Weiman’s memoir pretends to be nothing else than a real-life album of thirteen hit-and-run encounters with the title’s eponymous roommates, acquired through what became a dependably recurring ad in the Village Voice and elsewhere. So the game for the reader becomes divining out what’s made up from what’s literal.

We all know the rule. The more outrageous the quirk, the less likely it’s invented. So the customer rep who talked all day but kept a rigid vow of silence when she got home at night? You know she happened. Conversely, the “wry” roomie who kept Abyssinian cats and left behind nothing more wayward than some Roddy Doyle novels? Totally made up. 

The boarder with a furniture count fit for a house, no way for a two-bedroom Queens apartment? We get that. The dance enthusiast who left her tango partner and Weiman’s flat for law school in Texas? So what and no way.

Whatever the case, the even pitch of the author’s narrative says if it didn’t happen, it could have. We know she’s going for the larger point. If hell is other people, in the big city nowhere is that adage more infernally felt than in the enforced intimacy of the rooming partnership born of intractable economic necessity. Weiman tells just enough of her spare, often grating tales to activate nods of recognition among her Gotham readers.

Weiman suspends moral judgment in her straightly told accounting of multiple cohabitant disjunction, even lending her own serially beset lease-holding character an occasionally shrill, if respectfully earned quality.

She finally writes that what ultimately redeemed her from the roommate trap was a delirious stroke of luck that defied any sane tally of the known available odds. I believe her.