Judge

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Political Science. Art. The title of this collaborative political intervention can be read as a noun, a command or both. Vincent Katz is a writer and translator, and the author of a great deal of art criticism and nine books of poetry. Here, he presents his alterations to highly charged phrases from New York Times coverage of the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. Through radical collage editing, they've been made over into a book-length poem. Wayne Gonzales, a painter and printmaker, gathers images of George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and their cohort, and transforms them to highlight their sinister plainness - so that Tony Blair is half obscured and grinning like the Joker; a yellow Bush is striped like a malfunctioning television screen; the Pentagon resolves into a geometry puzzle from above; and each is pixellated into what look like Benday dots. Katz and Gonzales share a horror of current events, and have clearly decided it's time to speak up.