There's an entire phalanx of American poets Mark Wunderlich's age (he's in his mid-thirties) who write the way he does. You could even imagine a composite poem. You would be reading it in the New England Review, or maybe, if a number followed the title, in Fence. The lines would fall into a carefully managed form, more of a typographical felicity than a metrical pattern. A series of exquisite images would be deployed throughout: a jar of sea glass, the iris of a horse, the branching creases in black suede. Suddenly the sentences would rise to an emotive moment, a declaration of intense helplessness. But seconds after you finished reading the poem, it would settle back into that lovely, melancholic sheen that the models have in Banana Republic catalogs.

Period styles are not always fatal to poets, though, and Mark Wunderlich himself is no myrmidon. If he and his contemporaries over-value decoration, at least he has the most impressive design sense of the bunch: in poems like "Amaryllis," "Tack," "Landscape Dream #7" and "The Buck" he maintains a sharpness of diction and a swiftness of structural profile. He matches this skill with a contrary impulse, his wholesome love of excess. In his first book this took the form of narratives about sex, which too often sounded like journalistic prose. In this collection bondage is a metaphorical and a literal subject of the poems. Wunderlich also departs from conventional narratives by employing emblematic, even fantastical scenery.

It's heartening to see this poet challenging himself and his readers. Yet neither of these new methods succeeds completely. There's a preciosity, an enforced archness that reminds me of sepia photographs, elaborate cursive, and Halloween. And for all of the poems about S&M, I finished Voluntary Servitude hoping that the poet and his poems might rough each other up a little more in the future.

— Peter Campion