If wholly submersing oneself into the mind, personality, and id of another human being is one of the characteristics of a good writer, then Marc Woodworth’s debut collection displays a most conscientious artist at work. His poems suck in the breath of Sophia Tolstoy, Lovis Corinth, and Margarethe von Trotta and immerse the reader in characters so abandoned to their respective arts and loves that one might almost believe in the archival witness of the work. Yet Woodworth also wraps his characterization in selective language, coloring his meaning with phrases that lead to response in a carefully constructed architecture of emotion and intellect. The collection is at once imaginative and meticulous.
         Arcade does not spend all of its time with the inner lives of specific figures, and in fact is defined by a more universal style, one which looks down on the world from an undefined and ever-changing angle. Writing from a speculative core, Woodworth does not shrink from implicating the "we," particularly in urban poems such as "The Poet in His Garret" and "The Estranged City." Indeed, in the foreword Richard Howard notes that the author seldom uses the first person singular when "speaking in his own behalf." What this trait loses in deep personal involvement is regained through the sense that we can and are experiencing the marvelous normality of the world, however tawdry, however sinister, that Woodworth describes. "The Estranged City," for instance, is entirely built from a walk through a swollen and crumbling city as separate but undefined personas experience different responsibilities:

we visit the dying aunt with lost cousins who bear our name,

uneasy with her once fashionable art, that brocade
of forgetting, some hidden lineage in the death room;

we drag the canal for the body of a whore or schoolgirl,
which we will not find until the sun, soot and red,

climbs the rungs of morning windows to peer
into cavernous streets we have named for our heroes.

Woodworth’s first section of poems explores this idea of city from several perspectives and finally comes to a conclusion of hope amidst the horror, in which the poet is "grateful to be broken back to this." The decay, however disappointing, is beautiful and rewarding, and builds a pathos that is essential to the historical character work of later segments.
        In the hands of a less committed poet, the exposition contained by several of Woodworth’s persona poems would seem overtly clever. Instead, there is a rawness and immediacy of emotion available. In "Sophia Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana" Woodworth takes on the task of filling in the widow’s diary entry, a conversation with her dead husband in which she is wearily resolved in her mourning:

But all things sweet went out with your passion
for a program that left no room for life. . . .
Your leaving here was just your way
of wishing yourself dead before you died.

        Woodworth balances death and mental anguish with both universalities and intense private thoughts. These are sometimes gleaned from true letters and records, but often spring completely from his own creation, as in the cases of the imaginary filmmaker Herr Soma, who is poised on the brink of a mental breakdown, and the original Adam. Arcade does not shrink from the grotesque and dire for these characters. Instead, Woodworth telescopes from the general decay of the first sequence into individual troubles ranging from the psychological and sexual disease of Herr Soma to Corinth’s "lake of suicides" to Adam’s prototype for evil deeds: "father of murder / (the hard consonant of his name, my worst device; I will never repeat it)." Again, however, what is perhaps most unique about Woodworth’s personas is that they are fully conscious of their grim fates, and so again the reader is left with a sense of salvage.
        Whether looking at the world from within or without, Arcade’s reverence for art is clear. With painting (it is worth noting that the first sequence of poems is after the art of Frans Masereel), film, literature, and dance, Woodworth expresses both knowledge of and empathy for the turbulent lives of his artists. He uses specialized facts and concepts often, delving into the language of his speakers. In "After the Dance Concert," for instance, he refers to a "religion of pure movement" held by the dancer. "An Uncut Scene From Herr Soma’s Last Film" captures the frustration of the desperate filmmaker for the perfect take when the narrator comments that Soma "cannot recover the image intact / buried deep in the camera’s tricky chest." In "A Letter From Ryder," Woodworth as Ryder discusses the artist’s hobby of making perfume:

De Gay may carp about my using candle grease
to loosen up my paint–he says I’m worst
at caution, when it counts, than any man he’s ever seen

(but really I’m too safe–as if a reckless mix
of medium threw caution to the winds!)
…
I use my nose and when it smells so good
I’d eat the air, I call it done.

Incidental asides and carefully phrased ideas like these create for Woodworth another dimension, one of truth, in which his readers may understand his characters, offering intellectual stimulation in addition to emotional fulfillment.
       From Woodworth’s "A Letter From Ryder" one can draw perhaps the most significant theorem on which Arcade is based: "I know the fatality of making / makes the pictures what they are." With this idea and through characters like Lovis Corinth and Herr Soma, Woodworth touches on Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende, the brutal creation of art that demands pain and sometimes death in seeking the full measure of greatness in the work. Yet Woodworth’s work is not dangerous. He offers with his speakers’ emotional and professional trials a positive outlook that "inwardness and exposure" are necessary–the grotesque has a place in teaching us about "the world beneath the waking world" and in encouraging private revolutions. Woodworth’s greatest capacity, then, is to place himself, and his reader, in harm’s way, into the psychological depths of struggling people, and bring us back out, "unchanged and remade," according to the title poem, to continue living.