the John Paulson of Verse

"Robert Graves once remarked that just as there is no money in poetry, there is no poetry in money. But Katy Lederer sees it differently. Lederer has just published “The Heaven-Sent Leaf,” a collection of poetry animated by the idea of the economic bubble. “It’s so dry when you read it in the papers, but, really, it’s mythic,” she said recently, on a day that the stock market had dropped three hundred and seventy points. “It’s Icarus, it’s ‘Faust,’ it’s Eros and vanitas. It’s ‘Star Wars’!” If this is not a formula for literary success, it’s good market timing, at least; she might be the John Paulson of verse."

-Rebecca Rotham, Ballad of the Bubble (New Yorker, Dec. 8).