The Last Decent Jukebox in America by Doug Cox

LS&S Press, 2011. Sometimes poems call on their ancestors, sometimes they call them out. Doug Cox's poems do both, singing the praises of muses--family, musicians, other poets--while refraining from being too starry-eyed. Those muses, after all, are human, too, with flaws and failings that Cox's poems refuse to overlook; the narrators in these poems are like the friend you can trust to tell you (kindly) when you're being a jerk.

But the reason you should read it? Because these poems will become muses, too. Cox's poems dive into raucous punk rock benders, the unwieldy weight of loss, and insufferable injustices, wrapping them in received forms (ghazals, sonnets, villanelles) that try to give shape to, make manageable life's enormities. Still, sound escapes. When read aloud, the poems hum low, almost inaudible notes. They emit the hard crack of static. They howl with feedback. They fill you with song until you've got no choice but to bust out a poem of your own.

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.

The Naming of Strays by Erin Elizabeth Smith

There’s no forgiveness
in empty bottles, the silent
teeth of blackouts on bourbon
and cheap shiraz…

Gold Wake Press, 2011. Sound like your New Year’s Eve? 2012 has started off on a sassy note with Erin Elizabeth Smith’s The Naming of Strays—a collection that drawls and howls in a voice that’s unapologetic yet unmistakably real.

The texture of this book is cool in two ways. One, the front cover literally has kind of a velvety feel, which is always a plus. Two, throughout the four sections, which are divided into the Oxford definitions of the noun and verb “stray,” we are forced to see and feel and taste the worlds of the wanderer, deviator, roamer, animal.

To put it bluntly, these poems aren’t afraid to “go there.” Whereas another poet may bask in the cheery refuge of a home-cooked meal, Smith describes a “Still Life with Cook after One-Night Stand” as: “An uncooked bird needs/ brining, its pale rubber body/ sink-warm. There are cranberries/ to bleed. Lettuce to crack and clean.” The very next poem is titled “Driving Next to Two Men I’ve Slept With.” Yeah, we cringe, it’s awkward, we want to look away, but she refuses to with lines like: “In the bayou, the trees/ don’t speak, but deal in secrets/ and human combustion” and “We are three in this car but were once two-/ and two again. We try to believe nothing/ before this highway existed, these bodies that sheen/ like blades.” And again, the next poem, “Lovebugs” (for anyone who’s lived south of I-10, you know what these are), Smith exposes the creepiness and uncertainty of instinctual lust with: “They bang/ into banisters”… “love turned/ beast and blood in the streets.”

Building in verve and momentum, The Naming of Strays demands to be heard and remembered. You won’t regret taking it in. Happy 2012 y’all, and Read this Awesome Book!

CALIFORNIA by Jennifer Denrow

Preface: Jennifer Denrow’s California is one of the most underrated books of 2011.

These poems are an ethereal mapping of how our selves, our voices, our thoughts, and our desires are embodied, or, as it is, disembodied in the act of being. To exist is both a sorrow and joy, but what do we mean when we say something exists? How does place exist? How, through the act of thinking and speaking, do we transform ourselves, our own being? What does it mean to have a mouth? What does it mean to use it? And what does it mean to use someone else’s mouth? Denrow reaches inside and manipulates these questions into poems that are mirrors as much as they are their own breathing bodies, challenging the boundaries between the real, the artificial, and the imagined, and pointing to the place, the California, where they meet.


When I’m in California I’ll go to the beach
and cry. All of the seagulls will crowd

around me and force my mouth open
with their wings.


The book is appropriately ordered into three acts which, rather than sections, speak to Denrow's interest in the theatricality of being; how we act and are acted upon, how our selves become other. The first act, the long poem “California,” follows a speaker through her yearning to leave her life for a California that is more fiction than reality. “I should drive away from my life,” she states, and that is only the beginning. California becomes myth, utopia, and salvation until, ultimately, the rest of the world becomes an imitation of California.


I buy California style pizza and beer. I drop my ID when the woman
asks to see it.

No one in the store looks like they could be from California.

A baby eats some keys.


But what’s frightening here is that the speaker’s California is imagined, an end of America that is a means to forgetting her own inability to be other than herself. “If California didn’t exist, I’d still want to go there,” and that’s the terror of a heaven, that it could also be a hell, that it could be right now, that it could be nothing.

The third act, “A Knee for a Life,” is an ingenious series of epistolary poems between ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy, which is as sorrowful and funny as it is disturbing and tender. Again, these poems raise issues of agency, theatrics, and the continual cross-pollination of the real and imagined.

Dear Edgar,

Even in the stage light
your birds are not quiet.

Your hand is a little colder today. Are you feeling well?

Has anyone ever told you your hands are like soft, skyless
animals?


The question here, what or who animates us and what does it mean to feel or sense that animation, is at the root of what it means to speak, think, and create in this world. The answer is a dive into the spiritual grace and frenzied mystery that compels us to imagine beyond ourselves, and that Denrow is such a master of. From “California”:

…He said, Why do you want to go there?

Because I have to.

PANIC ATTACK, USA by Nate Slawson

YesYes Books, 2011. To say too much about Nate Slawson’s PANIC ATTACK, USA is to fail at matching its beauty and energy. I will be brief and trust you, to read this awesome book.

This book punched me in my face-heart (you have one too) and I liked it. In love indiscriminately with joy and hurt, these poems feel deeply—Slawson’s speaker (Slawson himself, or otherwise) knows that sometimes beauty is a sledgehammer to the knees, but still can’t seem to look away:

“call me Ponyboy and I’ll bleed all my blood for you

I am committed to that & fucking amen.”

And from one of my favorites, O SHOTGUN:

“In my chest are coalveins.

You have the blackest eyes

I have ever seen & your flowers

smell devastating. Like one

hundred rabbits in love

with magnolia blossoms.”

Just when it begins to feel like love isn’t enough, this book keeps believing in “all the ways a slow song / could undress you,” no matter the terror that nakedness and solitude brings. 

PANIC ATTACK, USA makes me believe in believing. Being alive is important, and these poems chronicle a very amazing part of how it is equal parts pain, and sheer ecstasy. I am trying to be as emphatic as possible here on the internet in text. You'll love this book!

The Disinformation Phase by Chris Toll

Publishing Genius, 2011. Chris Toll has built a book of machines called The Disinformation Phase. By Chris Toll I mean an alien who filters his dreams through vampire movies and writes encrypted letters about his own past and future hearts. By machines I mean that these poems are always eating their own parts, reinventing their own uses. This is because Toll uses words like they’re little piñatas, beating them with a metaphysical wiffle bat until praying mantises and algebra fall out. “I made my head and now I’ll weep into it,” Toll writes in “The Third Station of the Double-Crossed,” foregrounding emotional confetti over the dull armchair of coherence, putting semantics in the cathedral and letting it light the fuse. “Why is dent in resplendent?” he asks, and “Who pays the rent / in incoherent?” and it is good that Chris Toll is asking these questions because words are keeping all kinds of secrets. Like, when “a cheetah sleeps on an adverb,” (from “I Can’t Stand Along the Watchtower”) I totally understand because there is a modification taking place, which is part of the rule (an adverb is a word that modifies a verb), and I am also feeling partially rewired, epistemologically thawed, because few poems are willing to dive off their own cliffs into the accumulative, spaceship-colored, mysterious soup that builds our souls, or what’s left of them.

One of the most electric things about The Disinformation Phase are the “translations” of canonical poets spread throughout the collection. Each translation is paired with a short paragraph explaining the imagined discovery and history of the particular poem. Trying to summarize these narratives doesn’t do them justice: just know that Edgar Allen Poe’s step-mother goes skiing in Colorado and that John Keats believes in the force, like The Force. Here’s a stanza from one of Toll’s translations of an Emily Dickinson poem, “My Ruby Hat,” written in French and then hidden in a cupboard:

"I have the Gift of Second Sight –
Despair guzzles Gin’s Alphabet.
A Spider kneads a throne on the Moon.
The snoozing Singer writhes."

Indeed, Chris Toll’s irreverent imagination is a weird holy light in these poems. This is one of those books that you leave out on your desk, a thing you keep in reach, not only because its incredible cover (one of Toll’s own collages) refuses to be hidden on a bookshelf, but because these poems are irreducible, subversive fun. “You can see / as well with the heart / as with the eyes,” he writes in “Why Is Try in Poetry?” and that’s what’s at the riotous heart of this book, a rare, illimitable faith in internal wonder.

I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur by Mathias Svalina

Mudluscious Press, 2011. This book is at once hilarious, heartbreaking, and decidedly important in our very real, very odd (sometimes terrible) world of consumer madness. It is according to my definition, very amazing. I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPENEUR contains short chapters / poems (however you like best, to think of them) each detailing a different business started by the speaker. But nobody here is selling t-shirts or coffee. These businesses sell the fantastic, the almost-unimaginable, and the before now un-commoditized things to a hungry capitalist world:

“I started this one business that

employed generous looking, kind-hearted looking

people to walk by you & smile warmly at the exact

moment when all you can think about when you see a

building is how tall it would have to be to ensure that

the fall would kill you.”

The products in this book are the things we want but can’t have—the “solutions” to our very human problems and feelings that an exploded entrepreneurial culture has tricked us into believing we need, and can buy:

“I started this one business that gave

the parents of deceased children a glassful of sugar-

water each morning as they left their houses.

…

We could never make the sugar-water sweet enough.”

As a means of commenting on it, this book uses a razor-sharp and beautiful imagination to participate in our problematic capitalist detachedness. It will make you think about things you know, in a way you didn’t know to think about them.

 READ THIS AWESOME BOOK!