SOURCE: Friebert, Stuart. “The Truth of the Matter.” Field, no. 48 (spring 1993): 64-71.

In the following review of Magic City, by Komunyakaa, and Sleeping Preacher, by Julia Kasdorf, Friebert asserts that both volumes address the “facts” of human existence. Friebert observes that Magic City is a sort of extended autobiography of Komunyakaa's childhood in Louisiana.

These two books, Kasdorf's first (and winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize) [Sleeping Preacher], and Komunyakaa's mid-career volume [Magic City] are measured and sober books that settle within the lines of their subjects and stories, and do not fool around with things the poets don't know. Though they celebrate very different cultures, lives and landscapes, both pursue the “facts” of human existence, often in similar ways and strategies.

There's something of Rita Dove's strategy with Thomas and Beulah in Kasdorf's ways with her relatives, her past—she was born into Mennonite and...