TOM PAULIN is looked at by Judith Shulevitz:

It is this shrill style, more than the actual subject matter, that ties ''The Invasion Handbook'' to a poem like ''Killed in Crossfire.'' When it comes to Jews, Paulin actually feels -- or seems to want to feel -- guilty. He has written of his shame at not having taken Eliot's anti-Semitism seriously enough, and in the poem about Kristallnacht he rather grandly affixes the blame on Protestant Christianity itself. He comes across, in any event, as someone who needs to belabor the obvious in order to drown out his own conscience. He is not an anti-Semite, at least not in the chilly way Eliot was. Paulin is something slightly less dangerous, because easier to spot. He's a thug.

Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5.