I AIN'T ASKED ANY PARDON FOR ANYTHING I DONE by Sasha Fletcher

Greying Ghost, 2011. Sasha Fletcher's poems give us a world where everything is persistently consuming and being consumed by an extreme code of ethics, or lack thereof, defined by a brutal bandit-and-bible landscape. In other words, everyone and everything is either leaving, dying, crying, killing, or on fire. A cinematic Western-meets-Salamun-like logic puts us in deserts that eat tears, with coyotes who cut open other coyotes to hide inside them, and in trains that spontaneously burst into flames, all driven by an ontological hunger for survival that, as the title suggests, shuns forgiveness. Through it all, Fletcher transforms these formulaic characters and settings into darkly strange lyrics that meld human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, in bizarre situations that reveal the binary of malice and hope that governs our desires. Written in long lines that waver between violent directness and biblical intensity, these poems want to break out of themselves. In it's entirety, I am Feeling Good:


There are eggs from buzzards that I caught falling from the sky.

I opened my eyes until the sun burned them out and I grew new ones.

I bent my arm in the middle of all the bones. I heard them crack. The crack
I heard was the splitting of an old dead tree set on fire and left to burn.

I let the dust wash my tongue I let the bandits wash over me and swallow me
and pass around me and I saw it all and it was good and I pronounced it.

I howl but no sound comes out.

I will try harder next time to think more softly.


I Ain't Asked Any Pardon For Anything I Done is already sold out from Greying Ghost - even more evidence that this is an awesome book. If you don't know anyone who already owns a copy of this chapbook you need to need to get to know them. And as always, the elegant presentation from GG, with vintage battle maps in the interior, makes the experience that much better.