[Wallace is an American educator and poet. In the following excerpt, he lauds The Privilege for its direct language.]

Maxine Kumin's new poems [in The Privilege] are superb. She hardly makes a mistake. Her language always catches the world into the poem, is deliciously prosy, direct, surprising—"fog thick as terry cloth"—as are her strategies, which permit beginning a poem:

The symbol inside this poem is my father's feet
which, after fifty years of standing behind
the counter waiting on trade,
were tender and smooth and lay on the ironed sheet,
a study of white on white, like a dandy's shirt.

Childhood and now, the halves of her world mirror equally a vision of the isolation and enchantment of selfhood: in the remembered games, streets, convent school, legless man "who came / inside a little cart, inchmeal, / flatirons on his hands, downhill"; in the adult lovers, "oyster killers who live in a world / of sundown and gin and shellfish", and cannot afford to count their "own small gift of bones"; in fighting for sleep "by lying down" ("but the Walden of my mind / fills up with berry pickers"); in the gin for a lady dining on the past at the Ritz:

It is much darker than that.

She has come to the Ritz
with dirty toes.
Nothing she knows is dinner talk.
Mother presses the buzzer.
Father blesses the bread and pinches up salt.
No one may cry at the table.

In "Quarry, Pigeon Cove," "a makeshift amphibian", "breathing out silver ball bearings", she dives into the city that "waited, / hung upside down in the quarry" and

might have swum down looking
soundlessly into nothing,
down stairways and alleys of nothing
until the city took notice
and made me its citizen,
except that life stirred overhead.
I looked up. A dog walked over me.

A dog was swimming and splashing.
Air eggs nested in his fur.