Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

Maya Angelou's new "Life Mosaic Collection" at Hallmark arrives at a time of crisis in the world of greeting card verse. Despite the fact that the audience for inspirational verse has never been so vast, bitter infighting has broken out between the more formal neo-Cardist school, who insist upon such traditional materials, imagery and themes as card stock, dried flowers and Christmas, and the more contemporary purveyors of the O=B=J=E=C=T movement, who seek to explore the incongruities between the "language" of inspirational verse and the "object" on which it is printed, thereby limning the schema of relationships between "reader-as-object" and "object-as-self" within the context of the inspirational verse transaction.

(Ahem!) Marc Pietrzykowski reviews Maya Angelou's new Hallmark line of greeting cards etc., in the Contemporary Poetry Review.