Whether it was Trio House Press or Gullette himself who tapped UVA Press Production Manager Joel Coggins for its design, Coachella Elegy glitters as brilliantly outside as it does inside.  The immediate association is Hockney, and, like A Bigger Splash, Coachella Elegy is indeed a pleasure, a breezy collection of mostly one-page poems characterized by slender, cascading lines and by a striking visual crispness, as if its place-studies had been observed through the scoured-clean air of the Mojave.  Gullette is a poet of lyric and landscape, of understatement and ennui, and his American West comes rendered in all the glitz and garishness of what Baudrillard called, on the trail of the hyperreal in Southern California, “the irradiation of an objectless neutrality, immanent and solar.”  Coachella Elegy is also, however, an important new take on ecopoetics, since Palm Springs stands equally for a permissive escapism as well as the bright core of catastrophe, a place of abandon and exhaustion.