Applause

National Book Award finalist Carol Muske-Dukes explores joy, dread, and the solitary communion of applause Applause?provides twenty vivid and evocative poems by Carol Muske-Dukes. In ?Dream,? she seeks the past in reverie, along with bicoastal riffs on New York City and Los Angeles. ?The Eulogy? paints the scene of a funeral in sunny California where a young man who has died of AIDS is laid to rest. In the title poem, a twelve-part journey through the ritual of applause, Muske-Dukes examines the power of a gesture?clapping?to transform oneself from individual to communal. ?What a strange phenomenon,? she says, ?to be single and plural at once, to feel joy and dread simultaneously, to wish to acknowledge publicly one?s anonymity.?