Sandra Beasley is a local (DC) poet, so I felt I was doing a good deed for the area by buying her poetry collection, I Was the Jukebox. Right now, she’s more famous for her memoir, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl, but I just don’t have much interest in contemporary memoir.

I do admire her for putting together a living via readings, grants (usually, insofar as I can tell, to do poetry and writing programs in schools), and honorariums.

I also like her poetry.

Unlike a lot of poets who come out of the contemporary MFA scene, she avoids some of the surface ‘craftiness’ (and I don’t mean ‘craftiness’ as a synonym for ‘cunning’). She combines amusing surfaces with some lovely, deeper, revelatory stuff beneath it – including opening up on personal insecurities and vulnerabilities (particularly romantic and sexual ones).

I like it. But I don’t love it.

She’s a safer version of Kim Addonizio.

Addonizio seems to me to be a very similar poet, but, frankly, much better. She doesn’t stop at thought provoking, but goes all the way to heart and brain wrenching. She’s funnier, sexier, and more original.

But Addonizio is (at the risk of giving a woman’s age) also twenty-odd years older. Beasley has plenty of time to surpass her.