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From au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu Tue May 7 20:26:16 1996
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 09:07:09 -0500
From: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
To: pauls@etext.org
Subject: TRee 4b: chapbooks
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Issue #4.0, section b: chapbooks 2/94
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TapRoot is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground,
and Experimental language-centered arts. Over the past 10 years,
we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio-
verbal art in a variety of formats. In the August of 1992, we
began publish TapRoot Reviews, featuring a wide range of "Micro-
Press" publications, primarily language-oriented. This posting
is the second section of our 4th full electronic issue, containing
all of the short CHAPBOOK reviews; the first section contains all of
the zine reviews. We provide this information in the hope
that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs.
Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at:
au462@cleveland.freenet.edu
Requests for e-mail subsctiptions should be sent to the same
address--they are free, please indicate what you are requesting--
(a short but human message; this is not an automated listserve).
I believe it is FTPable from UMich, which also archives back issues.
A cummulative, searchable, and x-referenced HyperCard version is
under development--e-mail for status & availablility information.
Hard-copies of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review
material--in issue #4: features on E-Zines; "Remixsponse
Categorryarray" from Sub Rosa Press; John M. Bennett as
Collaborator; Jack Foley's "Adrift"; Roof Books; Audio
publications; recent work by Allison Knowles; and the Global Mail
MailArt Project. TapRoot Reviews intends to survey the boundries
of "literature", and provide access to work that stretches those
boundries.It is availablefrom: Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood
OH 44107--$2.50 pp. Both the print & electronic versions of TapRoot
are copyright 1994 by Burning Press, Cleveland. Burning Press is a
non-profit educational corporation. Permission granted to reproduce
this material FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that this
introductory notice is included. Burning Press is supported, in
part, with funds from the Ohio Arts Council.
Reviewers are identified by their initials at the end of each review:
Mark Amerika, Michael Basinski, Tom Becket, John M. Bennett, Jake
Berry, Daniel Davidson, Luigi-Bob Drake, Mark DuCharme, Bob Edwards,
R. Lee Etzwiler, Mike Gill, Bob Grumman, Joel Lipman, Susan Smith
Nash, Oberc, Charlotte Pressler, Andrew Russ, Nico Vassilakis, and
Thomas Willoch. Additional contributors are welcome: drop an e-note
or send SASE.
*** Many thanx to all contributors. ***
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CHAPBOOKS:
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Ron Androla: BLUE BLUE BLUE LABOR--Translucent Tendency Press,
3226 Raspberry, Erie PA, 16508. 28 pp., $? A photocopied
collection of eighteen poems from the workplace. A unique and
spectacular blend of poetry and life. Subconscious gurglings and
poetic rants, too acute to be beat, too elastic to be surreal,
these reach out and grip the reader with a perverse cadence and
sharp subjective claws. "Scum-boys mutate into silent workers.
What goes/ around, comes around, that's simple human justice..../
& the crack business was more/ profitable than the shops petty
shit. Poetry is a curse, a vulgar thing too, addicted to a/
language as liquid as glue, fumes of art, sniff/ bottle of Jim
Beam, obsessed, alcoholic..." Androla risking chaos, sometimes
succumbing to it.--rrle
Glen Armstrong: TOO OLD FOR TOYS--Sideshow Press, 2951 Voorheis,
Waterford MI, 48328. 24 pp., $3.50. Twenty free verse poems in a
concentrated form flagrant with rust-belt rhythms and experimental
touches. Armstrong batters our minds with a surreality-tainted
voice. "Her story is sad, I feed it to a goat." This is
enchantment for the lost ones, of the lost ones, by a lost one,
suggesting patterns which pop and sizzle. "...while liberty/ lies
dying at your feet, a monolith/ with a dirty syringe stuck in her
arm." With lacerating explicitness Armstrong digs out pieces of
the foreboding emptiness within us all, and does it in an amusing
way.--rrle
Rane Arroyo: COLUMBUS'S ORPHAN--JVC Books, RT. 2 Box 440C, Arcadia
FL, 33821. 55 pp., $7.95. Thirty poems divided into three
sections. This is Arroyo's third book. He is a Chicago-born
Puerto Rican with an intense voice. His search for identity, &
contemplation of heritage, endows his work with a fiery foundation
of sub-cultural being. His evocative descriptions are precise and
his use of Pop icons front a satirical existence. " though
gunpowder residue makes us/ all darker I'm a bitter James
Bond...", or "...think I'll take a bath read/ (reread) James
Baldwin's The Fire Next Time/ or The Bible that I stole from a
hotel/ in Cleveland." Between aggression and inhibition Rane
creates metaphors of conflict & culture. "for I bark so well!/
You should hear me purr my name:/ Rane/ n/ Arroyo/ homo sapien
puertorriqueo pretty/ book boy poet." You do not have to be
racially impelled, or influenced, to wither in the full radiance
of this voice.--rrle
Charles Atkinson: THE BEST OF US ON FIRE--Wayland Press, 675 S.
Sherman Dr., Denver CO, 80209. 32 pp., $4.00. These poems tell
of familiar, family situations. The speaker finds inspiration and
life force in being a parent and watching his child grow. He also
finds challenge and discord without answers. In the first poem,
"Cleansing," the father wakes knowing that his child needs to
urinate. He follows a familiar path through the dark house, takes
the child to the toilet, and puts the child back to bed. A later
poem, "Chopping a Mother's Piano," shows how painful growth and
change can be even when no wrong is committed: "Three sons and a
father did it:/ they used axes and a saw/ and the youngest a small
hammer./ Too many broken keys to play or sell;/ it was too heavy
to haul for junk./ On a snowing night they'd agreed/ to turn it to
firewood and wire;/ even she'd nodded from her chair." The reader
learns as the poem goes on that the mother had taught her sons to
play, but they had turned away from music and toward baseball as
they grew older. In breaking the piano, they painfully break a
tie with her. That says a lot about the mood of the book.--bg
Lenore Balliro: RIDING BICYCLES IN THE RAIN--Alms House Press, PO
Box 217, Pearl River NY, 10965. 24 pp., $5.00. This collection
won the '92 Alms House Press Chapbook contest. The poems paint
pictures and comment with a kind of editorial description: "In
Shanghai/ morning is not itself." What's implicit is that the
speaker is not herself as she wakes in a foreign place. Lots of
the poem's statements are loaded like that. The word choice ethic
might be described as one of "graceful surprise." Not shocking or
jarring, but new and therefore evocative.
Many of these poems are set in China and draw their momentum
from successions of images peculiar to the place. The first and
title poem shares this characteristic but differs from the rest in
that it is also propelled forward by repetition and variation of
words or phrases in previous lines. It's not a ranting, slam
poem; the redefinition or re-examination through repetition is
more reminiscent of Wallace Stevens in "Metaphors of a Magnifico"
("Twenty men crossing a bridge into a village/ are twenty men
crossing twenty bridges into twenty villages..."). Balliro
begins, "Riding bicycles in the rain, the rain, at night,/ the
rain in Hangzhou,/ Hundreds of bikes..."--mb
John M. Bennett: BLIND ON THE TEMPLE--Luna Bisonte, 137 Leland
Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 10 pp., $3.00. what's change's change
JMB in the last 4 years, the text, his utterance--some snapped
string and he's floating his balloon way overhead absorbing.
signals. syntax. crazy headfucking. the mad dadaist basement.
every poem is short, high speed footage as to emulate the film's
ability to stimulate sensory nodes. perhaps he's gotten closer to
actual synaptic activity. like thinking 'blind on the temple'
household. like a writing so condensed the molecular adhesion
gives way to form a new highly pressurized hybrid. beside his
ecstatic and ready-mades is AH-- or this book begins with "DAWN"
and concludes with "RELEASE" (these two use the same lines to seem
(like) the same poem). thirty pieces in 5 days. a flurry of
isolated focus able to crack-a-twig by staring twenty paces away.
family-life. a challenge to unravel and delight to be inside of.
or JMB's ace tongue cuts my neurons in half (saving the brain
considerable amounts of time.--nv
John M. Bennett. and Al Ackerman: WINDOW--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137
Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 8 pp., $1.00. Ackerman hacks
Bennett under the influence of BURRITO, which Ackerman explains in
marvelous calligraphy (a letter to Bennett reprinted here) could
be a homemade eatable stored in the freezer or one tiny member of
a friend's dream-litter of children produced by a surrogate.
Bennett's oozing, body parts-strewn poems would be a tasty burrito
in themselves. Ackerman's hack, "The Altereds" gets me going,
makes me "start slap-slapping my ears" along with the prosody, the
rhyme, the irresistible urge of mouth stiletto-heeling words.--ssn
Greg Boyd: CARNIVAL APTITUDE--Asylum Arts, PO Box 6203, Santa
Maria CA, 93456. $9.95. "More than anything I wanted a shovel,"
confesses the narrator in one of Greg Boyd's prose poems. This
odd desire leads him to want a rake, a push broom, a spade, a pair
of shears, the narrator finally risking all for the love a bicycle
pump. Such is Boyd's world, where characters are at the mercy of
those secret, terrible instincts that drive us without our
knowledge or consent. This unsettling world is by turns amusing
and melancholic, absurd and philosophical, and always presented in
prose that rolls off the tongue so pleasantly. One of the best
prose poems collections in recent years.--tw
Earl S. Braggs: HAT DANCER BLUE--Anhinga Press, PO Box 10595,
Tallahassee FL. 59 pp., $8.00. These poems have a sense of
rhythm and surprise that makes them ripe for reading out loud.
They actively play with sound repetition (not structured into
rhyme, though) and variations on familiar phrases. Both
characteristics are evident in these lines from the title poem:
"...I lean back and close my eyes// minutes before bedtime,
storybook time, anytime/ is night time when you haven't seen the
sky/ in over a year." Familiar phrases like "rose tinted glasses"
and "give peace a chance" metamorphose as follows: "...laughing/
from too much red wine and the rose tinted lenses/ of a pair of
John Lennon eyeglasses broken// because peace ain't never had a
chance..." The cast of characters includes old people familiar to
the speaker who give advice and have well-worn habits, as well as
people who are new to him and full of mystery and danger. The
poet rants with information and attitude about oppression,
injustice, and pain. There's no denying the politics in this
book, but to use that as a label would be to deny the wealth of
music, imagery, and personality.--mg
Les Bridges: READ 'EM AND WEEP--Lyndawn Corp., PO Box 1397 Cooper
Station, New York NY, 10276. 24 pp., $4.00. Normally I would
back off from any poetry collection that had quotes from The New
York Post or The Village Voice, but Bridges captures a NYC I used
to see when I live in New Jersey. These are ice-cold gritty poems
that leave layers of frostbite poisoning a hundred miles beneath
the skin. He grabs Manhattan by the balls, and make it piss in
you face. This is good strong stuff, from a writer stained with
the street.--o
Julie & Robert Brown, eds.: YOUNGSTOWN POETRY--The Bacchae Press,
2032 Arthur Dr. NW, Warren OH, 44485. 64 pp., $5.00. This
eclectic collection evolved out of a boisterous and well-attended
reading series at the Cedar, a Youngstown Ohio bar. The Cedar
reading series hosts a huge number of non-academic poets (this
anthology contains work by 47) whose voices resonate in the
Mohoning Valley space left behind by vanishing steel mills. It
would be impossible to describe the mood, voice, or subject
matter, except to say that it is genuine. The book contains love
poems, adultery poems, poems about the rust belt, and poems about
plants. A few photos provide a visual hint of the mood in
Youngstown.--mg
Lee Ann Brown: A MUSEME--Boog Literature, PO Box 221, Oceanside
NY, 11572. 16 pp., $1.00(?). A museme... Amuse me? Well, yet,
it's what you think--a Musewerk, each pome drawn from the names o'
the Nine deities plus one for their mom, Mnenosyne. Here's the
first, "Clio Loco":
O Oil Loci
I Loll, I coo,
I Coil olio
Lo, O ill ici,
Coo C.O.
Col. Clio."
Cool, huh? Also Funny & Lovely. "Holy-moly!/ Monopoly mania."--md
Edward Butscher: EROS DESCENDING--Dusty Dog, 1904-A Gladden,
Gallup NM, 87301. 24 pp., $3.00. This is Butscher's second in an
ongoing sequence of lyrical poetry sets. Almost like a spoken
anthem he leads us to visualize experiences. "...two bodies
locked in spasms/ of butterfly debris, the cheerleader/ I
worshipped from sidewall eyes/ and a collapsed football star."
There is a vivid and urgent potency, a suffocating possessiveness
in Butscher's work; something intensely personal, a sense of being
outgunned by life; inspiration from disaster, melded with erotic
nervous appeal, and the collapse of dreams. "fins erect/ gills
done/ tail aflame/ for an assault upon/ absence without end."--rrle
Cydney Chadwick: ENEMY CLOTHING--Five Fingers Press, PO Box 15426,
San Francisco CA, 94115. $9.95. Forty-four short fictions
constructed with a playful, light touch. The characters are
created with language as sharp and textured as a photorealistic
painting so that when transformations and identity shifts occur,
they startle the reader and give her a fresh perspective on the
underlying essences of things and people. A woman gradually turns
into a balloon, people playing the parts of cows and chickens at a
first annual butter and eggs festival reveal their "cow-ness" and
their "chicken-ness" to be more convincing than their humanity, a
woman's clothes come alive for the ultimate "bad hair day," a
conch shell picked up on the beach does not yield ocean sounds but
the Panavision views of the sides of experience no one wants to
see. Chadwick's fictions are irresistible.--ssn
Ana Christy: CONCRETE BOLOGNA--Alpha Beat Press, 31 A. Waterloo
St., New Hope PA, 18938. 80 pp., $10.00. These poems are not
concentrated or dense. They describe the speaker's moments,
scenes, actions, days. They'd read like fiction if there were
more of a plot line. Lyn Lifshin says Christy's poetry is "fresh,
energetic, open, lively..." I'd agree with all, except the
"fresh"--you'll finds lots of familiar phrases, especially
references to well-worn beatnik habits: "We'll get by in jeans,/
t-shirts/ and moccasins/ play dylan, read kerouac softly/ on our
geranium filled porch...". One poem unfortunately ends "I'm.../
yr burp/ yr fart/ yr impotence/ yr writer's block/ yr worst
nightmare!"--mg
Judson Crews: AGAINST ALL WOUNDS--Trout Creek Press, 5976 Billings
Rd., Parkdale OR, 97040. 26 pp., $2.50. Herein lies 23 short but
exciting poems, all jampacked free verse couplets in a primal
scream box. "...How persistently she has dis/ played those pock-
marks on her soul/ Pock-marks, shit--they are open, puss-/
excluding lesions. In my arms, how tot-/ Ally clean... Granted/
my cock or my tongue are hardly/ The most exacting of scientific
probes." Crews provides a consistent resistance to cadence with
abrupt starts and stops resulting in a sequence of disclosure.
His modern Pop mythos murmurs a naked vision, pointing out the
decadent, the odd, the painful aspects of our society, in
penetrating detail.--rrle
Judson Crews: MANNEQUIN ANYMORE THAT--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration
Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 33 pp., $3.00. I like dirty old
men who pose in front of Playboy pinup posters with that flicker
in their eye. And I like Judson Crews playing the dirty old man
in a cruder way than Locklin or Bukowski. There's no
pretentiousness, and whatever misogyny there is seems to be
neutralized by the harmlessness Crews projects. In one poem,
Crews asks: "What am I looking for when I walk into/ A topless
bar? Is it to see a good looking/ young woman degrade herself in
front of/ My eyes?" Another poem comes out of the same turf: "If
you publish these love poems, was/ Her final word, I'll sue your
ass for/ defamation of character--and further-/ More, for
maligning my butt." There is sex here, but it carries an inherent
innocence: these are soft gentle poems, by a man remembering and
touching his lost virility, by a man looking back on his youth.--o
Craig Czury: OBIT HOTEL--Pine Press, Box 530 Rt. 1, Landisburg PA,
17040. I've known Craig Czury for nearly a decade, and he has
never been in one place long. A traveler, his poems are hooked
from his consistent ability to be in a new place. They sparkle,
like a sunfish after catching in the hot sun on a stream shore--
beautiful, and then you realize the terror of the writhing fish.
Czury's poems are full of doors and windows. There is always this
going in and out and seeing in and out. The poems are like that:
turning inside of themselves and again outside: watching and
twisting both in the emotional and physical realms at the same
time and then not. It is a labyrinth to live with poetry. And in
this hotel along the way is a particularly memorable sequence for
Franz Kline.--mb
Raffael De Gruttola: MAPPLETHORPE IMPRESSIONS--Cordillera Press, 4
Marshall Rd., Natick MA, 01760. This folded sheet contains 10
haiku inspired by the much-protested Mapplethorpe photographs. As
such, they are sexually graphic: "snakelike/ man eating/ his own
tail" and "ringed pinkie/ finding the pee hole--/ still-life."
Can't say there's too many haiku like these.--tw
Raffael De Gruttola: RECYCLE/RECICLO--Cordillera Press, 4 Marshall
Rd., Natick MA, 01760. In these 19 haiku printed in both English
and Spanish, Raffael De Gruttola creates grim images of Latin
American life. "on the ground/ where a mother weeps/ blood
stains" reads one haiku. "in the hills/ behind the church/ small
arms fire" reads another. De Gruttola does not raise his voice or
shake his fist. Rather, he speaks quietly of disturbing events he
has witnessed. His calm approach makes his poetry all the more
chilling.--tw
Denise Dee: SOWKINS--Union of Opposites, 636 Hyde St. #301, San
Francisco CA, 94109. 106 pp., $5.00. There are writers who
entertain, and writers that grab you deep in your emotional gut
and bring out feelings you didn't even know you were capable of.
Denise does both, and in her new book SOWKINS you get tossed into
an honest portrayal of emotional threads being torn apart one
string at a time, often bringing one to the brink of an abyss so
dark and lonely that survival itself is questioned. There are too
many stories, too many insights, too many whiplashed emotions to
capture in a review. This is simply one of the best thing I have
read this year, and I can say with all honesty that I am jealous
of Denise' s ability to capture such intensity on the page.--o
Harold Dinkel & Paul Weinman: IN THE FISHTANK--Strangulensis
Research Labs, Rt. 6 Box 138, Charleston WV, 25311. 16 pp.
Another of Weinman's inimitable collections, complete with bleary
xerox, electric tape binding, and free-wheeling orthography. Each
poem is accompanied by a collage and/or drawing. The high point
of this series is "Cricket Talk," a poem with an amazing
conflation of eroticism, eating crickets, and pulp sociology.
Real, gritty, and irreplaceable.--jmb
Ed Dorn: THE DENVER LANDING 11 AUG. 1993--Uprising Press, c/o Mark
Hammer, 34 Tacoma Ave., Buffalo NY. $5.00. This handsomely done,
small collection of (5) poems by Ed Dorn was published as a
celebration of the poet's return to Buffalo, New York in October
of this year. The poems, however, revolve around the arrival of
Pope John Paul II in Denver for the International Catholic Youth
Conference, which was held in that city last year. The poems are
rich in sarcasm, satire, social comment and insight into the
American (commercial--is there another side?) ethos. Here is a
deluge of American language. The names and things of America
shape the poetic landscape. Fast moving pleasurable impact.
Boom.--mb
David Drummond-Milne: GLASS ENIGMA--Near the Edge Editions, Via C.
Battisiti 339, 55049 Viareggio, ITALY. $5.00? A delightful
collection of visual poems and collages sent as mail art to
Vittore Baroni between 1979 and 1981, after which the
correspondence ended. Baroni provides an introduction and running
commentary on the pieces, which are all quite beautiful, and
display a great deal of humor.--jmb
Paul Dutton: THE PLASTIC TYPEWRITER--Underwhich Editions, Box 262
Adelaide St. Station, Toronto Ontario, CANADA, M5C 2J4. 18 pp.,
$10.00. Although Paul Dutton finished this series of
prints/smudges made from a disassembled plastic typewriter in
1977, this is the first publication of the entire work. It's a
lovely sequence of visual pieces: letters pressed on broken type,
lines drawn in (presumably through typewriter ribbon), smudges,
fragments of rock lyrics, ribbon rubbings, fingerprints, typed
text, in short, a greatly enhanced set of textual elements. Given
the replacement of the typewriter by the word processor, there's a
flavor of nostalgia, or perhaps metaphor (in the destruction of
the typewriter) in this piece that may not have been originally
considered.--ar
Cliff Dweller: THIS CANDESCENT WORLD--Runaway Spoon Press, Box
3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $3. After years of reading his
work it was delightful to see a full book of his poems. While
poets often use the day's news to bitch away their sadness, Cliff
Dweller actually uses the headlines themselves to move beyond the
day to day trivialities. He sculpts narrative descriptions of
scenes suspended in the untapped imagination of collective
consciousness. There is a magic to these poems, a homeopathic
cure for contemporary malaise. By turning the headlines into
something other than, and beyond them, we are inoculated against
some of the terror they often sell. They are after all only words
that can be used to liberate, for the work of poetry. Cliff
Dweller's work is a course in the miracle of imagination over
information.--jb
Earth's Daugheters: FINE CHINA: TWENTY YEARS OF EARTH'S DAUGHTERS--
PO Box 41 Central Park Station, Buffalo NY, 14214. $14.00. This
anthology is a joint venture between EARTH'S DAUGHTERS, one of the
longest running feminist periodicals in the country, and
Springhouse Editions. It is a retrospective of the magazine,
which is now in its twentieth year of publishing; Fine China
selects well from the 37 issues it covers. Throughout its history
E.D. has opened and revealed the many aspects, facets, the many
different lives of women (working women, mothers, feminists,
daughters, lesbians, brides, witches etc.). Fine China does the
same. Represented are the exalted women poets of our times
(Levertov, Di Prima, Olds, etc.) as well as a host of other, less
well known women poets, and a few men. Comprehensive, Fine China
is a map of the world of women's poetry over the last two decades,
decades of awareness, struggles, war, growth, and creativity.
Fine China is a coven, a bee, and a well oiled literary machine.
EARTH'S DAUGHTERS was and is a developing all-female commune, and
a successful publishing venture. This Fine China: it is a
presence of women.--mb
Harry D. Eshleman: THE COLORS IN THE SKY--Runaway Spoon Press, PO
Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $3.00. Usually documenting
the experimental otherstream, occasionally Bob Grumman's Runaway
Spoon delivers a gem of , by comparison, traditional work. The
Colors In The Sky is one such gem. Eshleman is honest and direct,
without copping an attitude, which is refreshing in itself. His
poetry is drawn from daily experience, memory, and the eddies of
his own thought; it is full of true characters and just plain
truth. One poem, somewhat atypical for this collection, is a set
of instructions for writing poems, which instructs us not to write
poems about writing poems. Such dry and self-inclusive humor is
not uncommon here. Eshleman is no ivory tower poet, he breathes
the same air as everyone else, with the notable exception that
what he lives and breathes is the raw ore from which this
intelligent, incisive book was wrought.--jb
Raymond Federman: CRITIFICTION: POSTMODERN ESSAYS--SUNY Press,
State University Plaza, Albany NY 12246. 160 pp., $14.95.
Raymond Federman is a long time practitioner and theorist of
Postmodernist art and thought, whose novels include Double Or
Nothing, Take It Or Leave It, and The Two-Fold Vibration. In this
new book of "Postmodern Essays," Federman focuses on themes that
have obsessed him throughout his long career, including Surfiction
(a kind of fiction that he himself forwarded in the seventies),
Imagination As Pla{y}giarism, Self-Reflexive Narrative Devices,
The Mainstream Publishing Industry's Inability To Open Up New
Markets That Take Advantage of The Wealth of Experimental Novels
Being Written and, of course, Postmodernism (it's birth and it's
death). Federman tells us toward the end of this collection that:
"I am in the process of burying Postmodernism [because]
Postmodernism is indeed dead, finished: on one hand because it was
swallowed and digested by the economy and eventually excreted and
disseminated into the culture, on the other hand because it was
stifled by academic bickering and consequently turned into a
futile debate." But Federman isn't crying over the Death of
Postmodernism. Nor is he, like conservative critics whose names I
won't utter, ready to yell "Good Riddance!" Throughout these
informal, provocative essays, Federman celebrates the crazy
products of Postmodern Fiction: works by such writers as Pynchon,
Sukenick, Barth, Sorrentino, Gins, Abish and many others, as well
as the one writer who Federman has spent his entire adult life
studying and trying to make sense of: Samuel Beckett. The Ghost
of Beckett and all his alter-identities (Malloy, Malone, The
Unnameable) fills these pages. Federman goes so far as to say
that December 22, 1989, the day Beckett died, was also the day
Postmodernism died. Whatever Postmodernism is, and I guess we'll
talk about it until the Next Thing works its way into the
mainstream culture, anyone at all interested in getting a candid
take on what it could be should check this book out.--ma
Richard Foerster: PATTERNS OF DESCENT--Orchises Press, PO Box
20602, Alexandria VA, 22320. 94 pp., $12.95. In his second
collection from Orchises, Richard Foerster demonstrates his
mastery of elegant, formal and artfully executed verse. His poems
are serious, sad and fraught with doom. They are truly moving
poetic tales of passion and eros set in a tableau sometimes
personal, sometimes allusive and symbolic. And while the acronym
AIDS and the terminology of its ravaging plague is utterly absent,
indeed expunged, from these poems, its death curtain hangs as a
heavy backdrop. One finds this characteristic in the closing
stanza of "In the One-Third World": "but the dream I'd inhabit
forever reeks/ of gravid soil, the full scrotal blush/ of orchids,
anthers tumescent with pollen,/ the wild twining embrace, bare and
trembling:/ this momentary, delible earth." These are painful
lines, lush with longing and dread. They move incrementally, yet
fluidly, down through the design of the poem. And though, yes,
death IS the final release, the muted, pervasive irony of dying
from love is, in PATTERNS OF DESCENT, the authentically tragic
source of distinguished poetry.--jl
Jack Foley: ADRIFT--Pantograph Press, PO Box 9643, Berkeley CA,
94709. 78 pp., $8.95. When Jack Foley speaks, in this book, of
the mind's "ability to consider absolutely anything under the
sun... matched against the limitations everything in the world
places on it," (his italics) he reveals perfectly, I think, his
own mind's and art's size and balancedness. His works (mostly
poems) mix prose, doggerel, quotations high and low, jokes, and--
most tellingly--dialogue to go, simply, everywhere--deeply
everywhere.--bg
Robert Frazier & Bruce Boston: CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN
FOREST--Horror's Head Press, 140 Dickie Ave, Staten Island NY,
10314. 80 pp., $8.95. Boston and Frazier are longtime Science
Fiction poets whose work combines a surrealist sensibility with a
hard technological edge. Their CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN
FOREST invokes a jungle gone botanically mad: "It is a Sphinx that
lifts the world upon its back and grows./ Its veins are road maps
that lead nowhere,/ its breath a cypher,/ its inscrutable eyes
spin mandalas that drift and blue/ shift in toward Armageddon."
Eerie and evocative, these poems effectively explore a terrain
most poets don't even realize exists.--tw
Benjamin Friedlander: ANTERIOR FUTURE--Meow Press, 334 Bryant St.
#7, Buffalo NY, 14222. $5.00. Benjamin Friedlander edited JIMMY
AND LUCY'S HOUSE OF K and DARK AGES CLASP THE DAISY ROOT. Both
magazines focused on innovative, sometimes Language-centered,
writing. Friedlander certainly knows modern poetry. His own
poetry is sophisticated and complex; however, it is not
theoretically burdened, veiled, frustratingly abstract, or
hackneyed in form, content, or structure. The poems are private
but also lucidly public. They have both subject and information,
and they address the world beyond the conceit of much contemporary
poetry. Here is the much needed poetic intelligence which forces
poetry to go beyond philosophy into passion; by doing so, these
poems become art.--mb
G. N. Gabbard: DAILY NOUS: A RUN OF GNOMIC-STRIPS--Tin Wreath, PO
Box 13401, Albany NY, 12212. $2.00(?) A six-part sequence of
poems, distributed with TIN WREATH #27 (itself an excellent issue
of the magazine edited by David Gonsalves). There is a free-
wheeling and playful disregard for standard syntax and diction
here, along with frequent allusions to Mutt (of Mutt and Jeff),
ducks, and various comic and philosophical routines: "Consider the
sire; ponder the dam; then/ rereflect on trainers, even though/
the semiaquackquackquatic duck/ 's egg will hatch a pretty
duckling if// chewing anvils an ostrich sit the nest./ Spit on the
turf, pull a cigar alight,/ four elements are enough for any
body." (from "Idealism of Tuesday").--jmb
Peter Ganick: AGORAPHOBIA--Drogue Press, PO Box 1157 Cooper
Station, New York NY, 10276. $11.00. The poet confounds the
syntax of the imagination to do more than "lay bare the device."
Ganick proposes to negotiate the device, not as a matter of
commerce, but as a place to run over, between, and after the
linguistic obstacle course we call consciousness. It's a wild
read, especially after one realizes that her mind's being hacked
upon--but the beauty's this: we're being reconfigured by our own
knowledge systems.--ssn
Peter Ganick: LOGICAL GEOMETRIES--Runaway Spoon Press, Box 3621,
Port Charlotte, FL, 33946. $3.00. A longwork, in six sections,
with each section varying in style and content but consistent in
approach. It reads half as spontaneous analysis, half as poetry,
the final section in "couplets". A mind dance of sorts,
references that imply a center that defies ordinary description.
"the object, ivory and stellar where/ punch far out farm, got
challenge/ whose portion? inflates concept..." is a typical
example of a very atypical approach. Ganick's use of language
looks like reading sounds in the mind, the way the mind "hears"
the text and unwinds the fragments for meaning. By taking the
"reading" this additional step he calls the organizing principal,
the means by which we understand, into question--and then dances
amid the confusion. Taking chances is the code of this work,
shattering our illusions as we "listen".--jb
Rene Gregorio: THE X POEMS--X Press, PO Box 3702, Santa Fe, NM,
87501. 16 pp., $5.45. The title refers not to Malcom, but to a
generic figure, an algebraic variable looking into the stars to
ask the question that will define itself. Gregorio uses "X" as a
tool, placing it in situations, defining it and redefining it as a
means to arrive at metaphors that serve as pieces of answers to
the eternal questions.
This book is full of abstract talk that comes not from
sensual love or words but from the effort to speak in what one
critic calls "that almost unsayable area of experience between
human beings." Gregorio often seems to be trying to write poems
despite words: "It is the place of stations./ The lingering
between worlds./ A feast of exhausted heat./ All possessions and
trappings/ elsewhere."--mg
Jefferson Hansen: RED STREAMS OF GEORGE THROUGH PAGES--Runaway
Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. The visual
component of this poem pushes the eyes and mind past what the eyes
and mind want to do: that is, read it. The poem, therefore,
places the mind in jeopardy. It asks what is the purpose of form.
Is it for ease of just reading, or is it something else? Answer
is: it is other. Here is a poetry that pushes a limit by
combining a stream collage of writing with various constellations
of other words knitted within its tapestry. It is a weave that
occurs as it evolves and wonders always (among much else): How is
writing living, how living writing is, and reading is writing and
dreaming is writing also? You can't step into the same stream
twice--Damn, that is refreshing!--mb
A philosophical poem that swings, too--like John Dewey if he
could play jazz saxophone. Lines sweep visually across the pages,
broken into odd shapes and often in the middle of words. Other
chunks of writing--some poetry, some quotes from granddaddies of
American pragmatism like C.S. Peirce--further disrupt the flow
that still, however, flows. This poetry moves, and it thinks, two
activities that we don't have enough of.--mw
R.D. Hanson: VERGING--Curvd H&z, 1357 Lansdowne Ave., Toronto,
Ontario: CANADA, M6H 3Z9. 8 pp. A set of five poems referring to
youthful excesses in a delicate, minimalist style that move toward
greater complexity with each poem. An effective contrast of style
and content, presented in an attractive small booklet.--jmb
Steven Hartman: DING DONG DADA--Pinched Nerves, 1610 Avenue P #6B,
Brooklyn NY, 11229. 8 pp., 50". Partially a poetic tribute to
Dada, and partially the practice of it, Hartman provides us with a
glimpse of that luminous anti-moment at the beginning of the
century as we slide down the greased obelisk of its final decade.
One of the purest strokes of Dada here is to have Ken DiMaggio
write a "Neon Dadaist Manifesto" even though he confesses to never
having met a Neon Dadaist or even being familiar with the
movement. And as with earlier Dada, Hartman chooses the menial as
fodder for his poetry in "Saturday Nite Dada" by bringing in John
Travolta, and later the Tom Tom Club in the "Sacred Words of
Dada". Hartman is practicing uninhibited imagination in a
convoluted, uptight world. He turns that world inside out to
reveal its secrets in an absurd levity.--jb
Martin A. Hibbert and A. C. Evans: BETWEEN ALIEN WORLDS--Trombone
Press, 11 Sylvan Rd., Exeter, Devon ENGLAND, EX4 6EW. Just six
texts reacting off a sequence of six illustrations. But these are
Hibbert's texts and Evans' illustrations. Thus we experience
gnostic trance and mystical initiation as enigmatic totems grow
and contract in a shifting interior landscape. "We can rewrite
this text endlessly, outside of time; reconstitute the totem with
marvelous mutations... We can fall, silently, or speaking in
tongues, upwards towards our ecstasy." A visionary journey,
combining the insights of occult teaching and the beauties of
ecstatic language, to the portals between the real and the more-
than-real.--tw
Dick Higgins and Seng Ts'an (trans. George Brecht): AN
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE MOON: A COMMENTARY ON HSIN-HSIN MING--
Generator Press, 8139 Midland Rd., Mentor OH, 44060. 34 pp.,
$5.00. The Hsin-Hsin Ming consists of 73 Zen sayings by the third
Chinese patriarch, Seng Ts'an. English translations are printed
here with commentaries on each by Dick Higgins. The Hsin-Hsin
Ming sayings are often vague, and Higgins's comments are
contrastingly concrete. But not always; sometimes the comments
take off from the text, point away from it, back to it, give an
example, maybe contradict it. Overall? Plenty to think about.--ar
Anselm Hollo & Jane Dalrymple-Hollo: WEST IS LEFT ON THE MAP--Dead
Metaphor Press, PO Box 2076, Boulder CO, 80306. 32 pp., $4.95.
The Unstoppable Mr. Hollo continues w/ this suite of Lyrical
Abstractions, as I see it, ending Unabashed & Grinning: "...dear
woman I name Dream// dear called Because/ with you, a thousand
years would not be long enough." (She responds, I might add, w/ a
series of striking drawings, one to each poem--breaking cubism's
logic into more mysterious, interwoven figures). Of course the
"west" implicated is not just geographic but, ultimately, that
whole cultural monster we inherit from the ancients; "Odyss on
the old plate/ looked so comfortable in his body old enough/ to
fit a few words together." Not merely erudite--as if that weren't
enough--but Space Age Anselm, looking into the kiln of stars: "wee
terrible human race/ soon to go down or else into space." Agh,
take comfort in this Marriage of Heart & Head, rare for poetry:
"...who wasn't really a misanthrope/ merely defined/ anthropos/
very strictly." (Did I forget to mention Wit?) There's even a
great p>an to the Mail--& what poet hasn't wanted to write
something like that?--md
David B. Hopes: THE PENITENT MADGALENE--Franciscan University
Press, Steubenville OH, 43952. 28 pp., $5.00. This is Hopes'
return to poetry after several years abstinence, with a voice
consistent with that of his previous works: declarative,
confident, sensual, charismatic. It's a handsome book with clean
design, though typos plague the pages.
Nevertheless, the strong voice goes right for the big topics:
poems tell that life itself is the greatest thrill God gives us;
death is a part of that cycle and so is also thrilling; those of
us who are blessed with this awareness will declare the news to
others not out of obligation but because the inherent joy makes
declaration irresistible; and no amount of glorification suffices
to give thanks for it. If this sound too joyous or nice for you,
don't be fooled: there's nothing naive or cute. The declarations
are earned with blood.--mg
Allan Horrocks: HIGH PLASTICITY--846 Thomas St., State College
PA, 16803. 16 pp., $1.00. An interesting story about an ill-
conceived vending machine (the Vend-U-Tensil) that dispensed
sporks. Slices of surreal humor, bits about James Dean and
political assassination. The story is told in pages; some pages
have more text than others, but the text is expanded or shrunk to
fit the page, giving each one approximately equal weight--one
instance where the variation in fonts serves a useful purpose.--ar
Ann Imperato: SHE'S A MOVING WEAPON--Andromeda Press, PO Box
423592, San Francisco CA, 94102. 28 pp., $3.00. There's a
feminist edge to these poems, mixed with anger and understanding,
which can be a dangerous combination. In "Blond-Wig Warrior" we
get the blood and perfume and efficiency of a street corner whore
turned into a moving weapon. "His Arm" captures a misspelled
lover's name in a tattoo based on the love of pain rather than the
love of another person; "Dirty Knees" kicks male sexists in their
vital organs; "Penetration" grabs the physical joy of sex and
leaves you feeling turned inside out... and on & on. In "These
Birds," Ann starts out with "They say the San Francisco
Tenderloin/ is the armpit of 'Frisco/ But I say it's the mouth"--
no apologies, nor forgiveness, you know right up front where she's
coming from.-o
Ayn Imperato, ed: PSYCHE SUBVERSION--Andromeda Press, PO Box
423592, San Francisco CA, 94102. 124 pp., $8.00. This collection
captures some of the Bay area's best hard-edged writers. We get
Peter Plate's political view of the world, complete with
authoritarian cops, neglected and tossed to the side individuals,
and that slowly seeping anger that threatens to tear the walls
apart. Wend O'Matic throws some gut poems at us that leave the
solar plexus gasping for a taste of air. Jerme Spew, Bucky
Sinister, David McCord, and many other writers make an appearance,
with insightful bitter tales of life.--o
Darius James: NEGROPHOBIA: AN URBAN PARABLE--St. Martin's Press,.
175 Fifth Ave. Rm. 1715, New York NY, 10010. 192 pp., $8.95.
Reading Darius James' first novel, NEGROPHOBIA, is really a blast
as he takes us on cinematic joyride through the nightmarish vision
of one Bubbles Brazil, a beautiful adolescent cocktease whose
schizophrenic aversion to people of color causes her to
hallucinate a virtual reality populated with grotesquely distorted
characters like Uncle H. Rap Remus, whose goal is to exterminate
the entire white race. James' biting sarcasm and in-your-face
poetic intensity reminds one of some strange with a hilarious
encore by the cryonically revitalized Walt Disney who is portrayed
here as the racist-par-excellence whose monologue unravels such
verbal gems as "I wished upon a star---That one day this nation
would rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'Hang
the nigger and burn the Jew!'" If you've got the kind of dark
soul that enjoys going into the mercurial depths of the American
imagination, then you'll want to read this book ASAP.--ma
Sibyl James: THE ADVENTURES OF STOUT MAMA--Papier-Mache Press, 795
Via Manzana, Watsonville CA, 95076. 131 pp., $14.00. Stout Mama
is unrepentant--she worries about her weight, won't quit smoking ,
adores Che Guevara and Mick Jagger, is fiercely independent but
broods routinely about how others perceive her. She is a woman
who'll give up nothing she loves. She's tastefully reckless,
self-knowing without being self-centered, literary but no dweeb,
sassy and direct.
Stout Mama's adventures are composed in short sketches--tight
prose at once worldly and lighthearted, filled with the gestures
of America and its cultural iconography: partial recognition and
romantic fantasy on the rush hour freeway, WD-40, that "fine line
between sexist macho and the mockery of sexist macho," high school
sex education lectures, the foibles of teaching English in foreign
countries. The charm of the well-writ anecdote is ever-present,
and as you read these short tales you'll chuckle gleefully and
reach for the phone to pass the word along.--jl
James Johnson: SAY and INDEx--3350 13th St., Boulder CO, 80304.
$4.50 @. These are two small, well-produced artist's books.
INDEX consists of the alphabet, one letter per page, accompanied
by an image which is not orthographically related to the letter,
such as a skull with "K" or a fencing tool with "J". SAY is
another alphabet, only this time the letters are spelled
phonetically (in the artist's own quirky typeface), as in "ESS"
for "S."--jmb
Todd Katinski: SEPTIC STICK--PO Box 4301, Seattle WA, 98104.
28 pp., $5.00. A first chapbook for this word-slinger, and it is
full of learned despair, Gothic shadows, and imaginative connections; assertions of truth, erotic silences, and cultural
criticism in the form of free verse. A total of 29 poems with
titles like "Whoreific," "Bad Acid or Good Poetry," & "My Brain
Tasted Like Hell So I Spat It Out." Katinski is an iconoclast and
his cold critical eye give his voice a Beat snap. "Sometimes
objects/ Sometimes silence/ Sometimes our own drunken mumble/ but
most of the time the immeasurable/ space between the bodies in
bed/ makes one think of a sniper's bullet..." This is the voice
of a dark abiding presence, an outlaw intellect, which lives in
the deep recesses of all of us.--rrle
Richard Kostelanetz: WORDWORKS--BOA Editions, 740 University Ave.,
Rochester NY, 14607. 206 pp., $12.50. Richard Kostelanetz's
achievement as a visual poet, long suspect because of the
unevenness of the compositions with which he's flooded every
market he could get into, is here displayed condensed to its
impressive best--as when the letters "SLE" cross the bottom of,
and leave, a page that the letters "EEP" cross the top of, going
in the opposite direction, upside-down. Simple-seeming, no doubt,
but how could anything be more illuminating about the off-the-page
world we sleep into, and weightlessly, loftily, magically, dream
back from?--bg
Sparrow 13 LaughingWand: QUEEN OF SHADE--Zeitgeist Press, 500
Ygnacio Valley Rd. Suite 225, Walnut Creek CA, 94596. 20 pp,
$3.00. These are poems about drugs and alcohol, sex, and life on
the street. The language and rhythm are that of off-hand, every-
day speech tightened up a little to maintain momentum. Repeated
phrases often predicate the rhythm, as in: "maybe tonight ill burn
that candle/ maybe tonight ill drive that nail/ maybe when you
hear me pound it in/ youll shut up..." (from "the edge that parts
our breath"). Punctuation and capitalization are absent, which
sometimes makes reading difficult. A kind of hip, street rhythm
laced with refrains would make this fun to read over bongos.--mg
Lyn Lifshin: HE WANTS HIS MEAT IN THE WOMAN WHO'S DEAD--Homemade
Ice Cream Press, PO Box 470186, Fort Worth TX, 76147. 10 pp.,
$2.00. A photocopied collection of thirty-one free verse poems by
this prolific poet, with exceptional artwork by Dan Nielson. For
all of her poetry Lyn Lifshin remains an enigma; it is hard not to
read a touch of confession, as well as deep empathy into her work.
Here she provides a nightmarish and turbulent reflection of our
terror as it exists amid cold-blooded monsters disguised as
humans. Necrophilia, abuse, pedophilia, mobsters, murder,
dismemberment are all included and every bright, red drop
stimulates the reader's mind with startling images. In one poem
she confides "I ran away/ skipped school/ got gang raped." In
another, she pounds us with a horror of childhood sexual abuse: "I
had/ pneumonia/ from swallowing/ my father's/ semen..." This is a
critique of our times, broken and blackened. Lifshin doesn't shy
away from the shocking--she frags us.--rrle
Jon Longhi: ZUCCHINI AND OTHER STORIES--Manic D Press, PO Box
410804, San Francisco CA, 94141. 16 pp., $3.00. Longhi has the
tactics and strategy of a hit-and-run driver: fuck 'em up and
leave 'em for dead. He takes on circus clowns, anarchist
skatepunks, redneck rodeo heavens, foursomes before the days of
AIDS, and whatever else captures his angry fancy. These are
nonapologetic bursts that make up a modern street battered Spoon
River anthology. If you want to have your senses kicked against a
wall, and feel the coldness of that wall as you slowly slide to
the floor, capture this, and Longhi's Bricks & Anchors, before the
lights begin to dim.--o
Malok: GOD'S BOOK--Found Street, 14492 Ontario Cir., Westminster
CA, 92683. 8 pp., $1.00. Fascinatingly non-representational,
absurd, illuminating, crazy/wise ink-drawings of "God's Ear,"
"God's Face," "God's Grimace," "God's Hemp," "God's Rush, " and
"God's Rectum."--bg
Marcelijus Martinaitis: THE BALLADS OF KIKUTIS (translated from
the Lithuanian by Laima Sruoginis)--Mr. Cogito (Vol. IX, # 1,
1993), PO Box 66124, Portland OR, 97266. $3.75, These poems are
all focused on one "Kukutis," who is a quasi-mythical person
representing a broad sense of cultural identity that is often
described as missing or ineffable. Given Lithuania's recent
history, the political/social resonance of this is clear and is at
times quite explicit. Most of these poems, however, are also
filled with a surrealistic beauty: "All these years I haven't
eaten anything--/ the mine explosions scattered my insides/ all
over the branches/ and made a mouth harmonica out of my teeth"
(from "Kukutis' Application to Receive Temporary Relief Aid").
The book is introduced by the author. It is a pleasure to
encounter this work, and in a translation that reads well in
English.--jmb
Michael McClure, REBEL LIONS--New Directions, 80 Eighth Ave., New
York NY, 10011. $10.95. In his introduction, McClure defines a
rebel lion as "a spirit in revolt against his or her own custom
and habit." And throughout the book one senses, hears, witnesses
a breakthrough of the imagination into flesh as spirit as flesh
as... the ubiquity of mammal consciousness at war with itself or
anything that might inhibit the moment of liberation. In the
opening pages we hear the "the beat of hammers," "the hollow
dragging of a crowbar," but "These cannot disperse the memory of
the striding/ of a jaguar..." The soul of the living creature
moving in physical time and space refuses to be overwhelmed by the
objects that clang and clutter our lives. These are poems to be
sung, bodied forth--chants to invoke the deepest resonance of our
biology and the universe as organism unbounded. Many years ago
McClure, with Ginsberg and the others, took the stage one night in
San Francisco and resurrected poetry from its bookish grave, gave
it voices, bodies--restored it as the singing of our species.
Rebel Lions suggest McClure is as vital , and as important, a
singer of that song as anyone alive.--jb
David McCord: THE WORLD OWES ME LUNCH--PO Box 1352, Berkeley CA,
94701. 62 pp., $5.00. The standout in this collection is a tale
about a man who ends up crucified in a construction site, and the
detective who is sent to investigate. It's urban angst, a
resurrection story and a mystery with more questions than answers.
McCord has a Ray Bradbury approach to modern alienation, and knows
how to make the most of a bad situation by tossing you into the
center of the action, as he slips out the door.--o
Jay Meek & F. D. Reeve, eds.: AFTER THE STORM--Maisonneuve Press,
PO Box 2980, Washington DC, 20013. 121 pp., $10.95. Those who
forget history are doomed to repeat it--and sadly, the memory of
Desert Storm seems to fade from our collective psychic landscape.
This anthology attempts to capture and reflect on the lessons the
Gulf War--much as did Belinda Subraman's The Gulf War: Many
Perspectives collection, and Leslie Scalapino's O 3 anthology [see
reviews in TRR #1 & #3]. The names here include many of American
poetry's "big guns"--Robert Bly, Amy Clampitt, Jayne Cortez, Allen
Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, William Stafford... But the tone tends
toward the strident, occasionally as shrill as an air-raid siren--
impassioned but unlistenable, and ultimately less human than work
in the aforementioned, lesser-known volumes. Political poetry,
with the balance leaning heavy towards the politics.--lbd
D.P. Milliken: OR #159--PO Box 868, Amherst MA, 01004. Or is a
series of artist books produced for years by D. P. Milliken, each
one different and each one a delight in it's own way. Many
include material the editor has received in the mail. No. 159 has
a series of drawings and anomalous words, each accompanied by a
little list. I don't know if these books are for sale, but they
certainly are a treasure.--jmb
Todd Moore: I WANT A POEM TO BE HARD LIKE A BULLET--Homemade Ice
Cream Press, PO Box 470186, Fort Worth TX, 76147. 10 pp. $2.00.
An 8 1/2" X 11" photocopied collection of twenty-one violent poems
which the poet defines as "reality-based poetry." Artwork by
Robert W. Howington, mostly minimalist stick figures, and
newspaper clippings of violence. These poems are alive with
crisis; "am i wrong/ or is that/ blood whistling/ out of the
holes/ in his throat." Moore is definitely intense and his short
free verse poems are full of biting savagery, furious razor slices
of shock, and ghastly everyday images. This is a verbal binge of
vigorous fear twisted from the bowels of assault: "those days
we'd shoot at whatever moved..."--rrle
Gale Nelson: THE MYSTIC CIPHER--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge
Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 24 pp., $4.00. These are cerebral,
Language-style poems that often contain a cool, ethereal beauty:
"Best tray of almonds resides more in heat than/ light. A capsule
decoded fatherly. Symptoms/ of blue light cannot flare in
sandalwood" ("Ode"). Some of the lexical choices have a quality
of having been made randomly, and then carefully arranged into
standard syntactical and discursive patterns. There is one
sequence where texts alternate with bureaucratic documents
arranged into "Poems"--these seem included either for their
contrast to or similarity with Nelson's own text, and the
ambiguity is most intriguing.--jmb
Dan Nielsen: INSINCERE FLATTERY & THINLY VEILED SARCASM--BGS
Press, 1240 William St., Racine, WI, 53402. 16 pp., $2.00.
Nielsen is back in full force, armed to the teeth, and ready to
attack with small bursts of brutal honesty. This collection
includes a great poem about amnesia, only upon examination the
individual turns out to "not have a name and/ nothing has ever
happened to you." In "Now What?" we get a Catholic tale of an
oversexed 14 year-old who prays to "the blessed virgin" and ends
up fucking her in his dreams. The best line in this book, filled
with great one-liners, is: "i said, 'our bed/ is like a rock/ in
the middle/ of the ocean.' and she said, 'well,/ let's get a new
one.'"--o
Kurt Nimmo: CRIMINAL CLASS--Translucent Tendency Press, 3226
Raspberry, Eire, PA, 16508. 12 pp., $1.00. The first paragraph
of this story leads the reader to think it's going to be another
one of those stories about a writer trying to write a story.
Luckily, it ends up being about job security and tension between
the moneyed, ruling class and the poor class of service workers
who feel lucky to have joys but are always worried that by next
week they may be unemployed. The politics is about as overt as it
can be without being an essay.--mg
Kurt Nimmo: FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME--Persona Non Grata, 46000
Geddes Rd., #86, Canton MI, 48188. 42 pp., $4.95. Nimmo always
grabs my attention, and in this collection he starts with an essay
about the death of Samuel Beckett, leaps into a great NO BUDWEISER
IN THE LESBIAN ART COLONY bar story, and then talks about being
alienated from poets and poetry. I happen to agree with what he
has to say in both the stories and essays in this collection; and
I think that Nimmo's willingness to put his balls on the cutting
board of political incorrectness shows a decisiveness many writers
lack. Nimmo knows what he thinks, and let's you have it point
blank.--o
Kurt Nimmo: SUSAN ATKINS--Persona Non Grata, 46000 Geddes Rd.,
#86, Canton MI, 48188. 64 pp., $5.00. Kurt Nimmo is one of those
people you would rather not have live next door, but you'd be
damned sure to put him at the top of your mailing list. He
captures the joy of ugliness, the thrill of existentialism and the
sensationalism of commercial pop culture in clean easy sweeps of
words. In SUSAN ATKINS we read about his lusting loins for a
touch of Susan, even thought we all know that Susan is Charlie
Manson's girl and Kurt doesn't have a chance in hell. Page after
page of lust and infatuation follow, and the only relief comes at
the end of the book, when there are no more words. But by then,
you have an infatuation for Susan as well. This is a book to hide
from your kids; read it a second time and try to decide whether or
not Nimmo is putting you on, or is so goddamn serious he should be
locked up right away.--o
Mickey O'Connor: THE CHARLESGATE APARTMENT POEMS--The Elbow Press,
PO Box 21671, Seattle WA, 98111. 41 pp., $8.00. concise line
breaks, impacted drunkenesque, and clarity of emotion bring this
book here. there is no obfuscating pedantic, just a poet's talk
between thwarted and requited joy. unlike so much writing today--
you are allowed entry not only into thinking, but feeling.
O'Connor uses the pause of line break to attract. the title
evokes place, in such a way, that you sense transformation
occurred in this room, in this apartment, in everything that
happened while living there.--nv
Rochelle Owens: HOW MUCH PAINT DOES THE PAINTING NEED--Kulchur
Foundation, , New York NY. Poetry video. An experimental art
film of seething, coming-to-the-surface violence and raging,
polyphonous voices. The collaged surface of images and rich,
color-saturated shots of artists speaking and repeating Owens'
poetry from behind veils or screens of rain-splattered glass or
meshes of ropes suggest new ways of reading Owens' poetry. One
motif predominates: a strong, white-robed Native American woman
striding through tall green marsh grass. This image connects the
visceral with the earth, and suggests that colonized or
exterminated peoples (or genders) still live in the core of the
cultural imagination.--ssn
John Perlman: ANACOUSTIC--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines,
Morris MN, 56267. Wind, water, ocean provide restless motion and
the fluid in which to suspend lyrical contemplations. "Full Moon"
is almost incantatory with its internal rhythms, alliteration and
assonance: "how the vast mad multiples / of nightmare gather to a
perfect / pitiless radiance."--ssn
Dan Raphael: THE BONES BEGIN TO SING--Twenty-Six Books, 6735 SE
78th, Portland OR, 97206. 26 pp., $3.00. i am strapped in--my
head inside a helmet of darkness. this book is a viewing screen.
there is an onslaught of image. almost every poem is an attack on
the senses--color, light, sound, juxtaposed realities. each piece
wants to scar the reader, to render reader... with jarring,
shaking, followed by flowing reveries, and always raph>lite humor.
these are updated surrealist ingredients. an american surreal
poet that enjoys--instead of the anguish.--nv
David Thomas Roberts: THE EXECUTION--Pinelands Press, PO Box 5243,
Kreole Station, Moss Point MS, 39562. $3.00. Surrealist poetry
that captures the defiant flavor of the American South. "Rail to
ravine goes my scrubby feast/ On a rasher of hills-guts hung with/
Junk" begins one poem. It's like listening to a drunken good old
boy shout out his life of hallucinatory splendor: "House of
Baroque eroticism wrapped in vermilion thunder/ House of Gothic
orgasm and Ozark rapture/ House of the diapason blasting planets
in my girl's rosy fundament/ HOWDY HOWDY HOWDY!!!"--tw
Joe Ross: AN AMERICAN VOYAGE--Sun & Moon Press, 6026 Wilshire
Blvd., Los Angeles CA, 90036. 95 pp., $9.95. The gorgeous
reproduction of Thomas Cole's "The Voyage of Life: Manhood" on the
cover lets the reader know right away that this work connects with
all the writers who pushed themselves to try to define America in
poetic terms. Echoes of 19th-century transcendentalism resound in
the circular structures of "A Still Prayer." The epic structure
of Ross's journey resonates with Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself,"
Hart Crane's "The Bridge," Jean Toomer's "Blue Meridian," Gertrude
Stein's "The Making of Americans." However, Ross takes the reader
down interior channels previously unexplored and in the process,
we create a new frontier forged of our own minds.--ssn
Timothy Russell: ADVERSARIA--TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern
Univ. Press, Evanston IL, 60208. 87 pp. James Wright's imprint
is noticeable throughout this prize-winning collection. Readers
appreciative of plain-spoken poems which articulate the lives and
localities of the Ohio River Valley will discover in Timothy
Russell a narrative poet closely attuned to the daily and seasonal
details of place. The Wright lineage is unmistakable in such
lines as "Tonight I briefly thought I might explode/ In
blossom..." ("In Vivo") and "What you do here for entertainment
is/ you visit the bus station early/ to get the Wheeling paper and
to see/ the latest Little Egypt dressed..." ("In Otium"). Indeed,
that line of work extending from Williams' dicta about pursuing
the American idiom is the resonant sounding board spuming and
snarling in Russell's work.
Both Williams and Wright are admirable forefathers, and
Russell has learned their lessons well. His writing is clear and
uncrowded, populous with citizens, sensitive to the ironic
juxtaposing of beauty and decay, unafraid to leap ascendent or
plunge into the grotty scuzz of the mundane ("...next week/
another gang of hoodlums/ will again be gouging the shiniest cars/
in the neighborhood..." (In Novus Ordo"). Adversaria is a classy
addition to the Rust Belt strain of the American Grain.-jl
Dennis Salen: THIS IS NOT SURREALISM--1996 Grandview, Seattle CA,
93995. 29 pp., $5.95. Salen's seventh chapbook contains 11
thematic sharp-edged poems, each a correlated study of a specific
surrealist, or a surrealist's work. Utilizing 2 & 3 line stanzas
of free verse in a minimalistic pseudo-Haiku twist, Salen has
trapped an epiphany between the frightening pace of his drumbeat
cadences. There is something very primal here. "He laughs
brokenly/ His tongue catches/ and sticks/ the blue syllables/ fall
to the floor/ and shatter/ diamonds/ hours/ precious light"
Though not pure surrealism, the association is there through the
theme and surprise. There is the primary delight of the French
Symbolists underlying this work, a journey to a land of dream-like
machinations. "Coincidence squared/ equals/ d vu."--rrle
Michael Scalzi: A WHETORICAL APOLCALYPSE--846 Thomas St., State
College PA, 16803. 13 pp., $1.00. A short story on the dangers
of remembering too much of
oneself, and of diving too far into
mysticism. If everything is one, then is there anything other
than yourself? A very interesting exploration of the extreme
(psychotic?) ramifications of P.D. Ouspensky/Gurdjieff mysticism.--ar
Spencer Selby:, SOUND OFF--Detour Press, 1506 Grand Ave. #3, St.
Paul MN, 55105. 64 pp., $7.95. A nicely produced perfect-bound
volume of poems, each of which is a meditation on poetry (or
language) and knowing, and how they might relate, processes that
are essentially elusive and unknowable, a fact of which the text
is aware: "It seems you are lost in a jungle/ displayed through
every sign of life that// you can't get your hands on, closing in/
then falling back when probability says// it just wants a good
honest watershed/ with which to ride things out." (from "No Way")
Selby has pulled off a difficult feat here: the poems contain an
intelligent discussion of issues that are abstract and ineffable,
and yet they achieve a great lyric beauty at the same time:
"Timebound secrets fall inside each new departure// moving smartly
down the current drive. Dark/ lines stand at every turn, with not
a word to waste/ before the trail you're making eats you alive."
(from "The Circuit")--jmb
Musing-turned-pure-feeling in poems about the way, in life,
that "Puzzles break and break down/ like rivers you forget in the
rain." Sundry brilliances of wording, as in the preceding
quotation when the meaning of "break" abruptly shifts from "coming
apart" to "come suddenly into being or notice." Equally brilliant
abrupt fusions of the conceptual with the sensual--as when, in the
same passage, certain minor puzzles in the over-puzzle that is
existence are compared to rivers blinking out of notice in the
higher, grander body of water (& noise) that rain is.--bg
Jack Skelley: GOD RAISED MY DUMMY--Found Street, 14492 Ontario
Cir., Westminster CA, 92683. 16 pp., $1.00. Number 7 in the
Found Street series, consisting of two poems by Jack Skelley. One
seems merely to literally (and fondly) describe a woman's ability
to make salad, but slowly, subtly, becomes a high-rite celebration
of everything she is; the other is equally playfully/ardently in
love with the same woman.--bg
Arnold Skemer: C--Phrygian Press, 58-09 205th St., Bayside NY,
11364. 54 pp., $6.00. Unfashionable (that's a compliment). This
narrative plays with point of view: "You" to "he" to "I" to "he"
to "you" again; and the structure is a circular movement framing
the narrator's oscillations: in/out/in/out... I intend this sexual
pun: the self-exiled narrator, alone in his Adirondack Mountains
cabin, oscillates between megalomaniac self-aggrandizement and
utter self-loathing, between displays of rarefied intellectuality
and displays of brutal violence, between absorption into the
blood-pulse of animal nature and frozen estrangement from
everything material. All this rendered in an abstract, high-
styled Modernist prose; a full treatment of the alienated male
narcissist of the post World War I avant-garde. The narrative,
however, gives a linear progress of events which may undercut its
form: the narrator cooks stew, drinks vodka, kills squirrels,
takes a shit. One-way transformations of the material
foregrounded by the cyclical, oscillating narrative structures
which try, ineffectually, to deny them. Despite this, the work
has some distinct limitations, and is, I think, largely blind to
them. But these limitations, though very much of this work's
time and place, are not of its writer's or readers' time and
place. This seems like a deliberate choice on Skemer's part,
which does create some interest in the work, for me.--cp
Amy Sparks: QUEEN OF CUPS--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH,
44107. 36 pp., $5.00. For a woman who's won quite a few rough &
tumble Poetry Slams, Amy Sparks writes a surprisingly quiet and
introspective poetry filled with delicate imagery. Her subjects,
however, are often less than delicate. From her "Brownsville,
Texas": "A woman wakes before dawn hearing a coarse wind blowing
through her womb. The sun stuns the pavement. The river takes
its trash, tail between legs, to the sea." Among the best work
here is "Histories," a set of prose poems about a trip through
Europe. Here Sparks builds dreamy scenarios with simple
declarative sentences. From "Malaga": "Lie and listen to a
language you cannot speak. The stories are intricate and loud.
They mean nothing. Your tongue is unmoved. But your ears are
wound tight as metal coils." Fine work.--tw
Jerme Spew: INTO THE BADLANDS--Synthetic Productions, PO Box 3506,
Oakland CA, 94609. 32 pp., $4.00. Jerme Spew is part of the San
Francisco publishing group that put the likes of Henry Rollins to
shame. These people (the Manic D, Andromeda, and Synthetic
Productions crews) network well, and carry an edge that most
publishers are afraid to touch for fear of getting injured. In
this collection we catch Spew's observations of a world that
should have been knocked out of orbit 100 years ago, but continues
on in a low budget sci-fi b-flick reality. We get tales of jail
stints, self-administered abortions, spoken word performances
where the audience attacks the speaker, vivid descriptions of the
urinals in the Asby BART station, and a hundred other evils people
lock their doors to hide from. This isn't easy writing to take,
but it is necessary, because the world is not, in fact, a pretty
place, and closing your eyes won't make it go away.--o
Thomas Lowe Taylor: DAS MARCHEN--Anabasis, PO Box 8766, Portland
OR, 97207. $4.00. A meditation on memory and sense of self, and
on the relationship of language to consciousness of same; a kind
of act-of-writing on the idea of the author's autobiography and
what it might mean to write one. The text consists of a few long
sparsely punctuated prose passages: "...And heavier hours claim
your time as passage and remote, another nice day spent in front
of what was once behind or maybe just left out to air and into the
recollection of names, a day and its blue messages, marking yellow
and orange as afterthoughts and as association where they are, and
there is where they were, that's simple enough to be less than
speech in the silence of the afternoon..." This writing has the
quality of a chanted sutra, in which the narrative content of the
words is only as important as their symbolic representation of a
desired state of mind. The text is preceded and followed by
highly perceptive essays by Susan Smith Nash, which form both a
personal and intellectual frame for Taylor's work.--jmb
Thomas Lowe Taylor: THE ONE, THE SAME, & THE OTHER--Texture Press,
3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. $8.00(?). Co-produced
with Spectacular Diseases in London. A highly subjective
"Poetics" which could be described as a series of meditations on
the idea of metaphor, that is, on how processes, acts, and things
are all inter-related. The "poetics" comes in as an on-going
discussion of the problems language creates in perceiving this
unity of the world, while at the same time being essential to its
perception: "The actualities of movement reflected in the visual
isolation of speech, as connectedness interpenetrates with the
thing in its location of variable presence. Beyond the diagrams
of possibility, the styles and postures of being elongate through
plasticity (variation) into arrangements of the one." Or, as
Taylor puts it in the introduction: "So making love is analogous
for something else, and that is what this is all about." This is
fascinating reading. Includes a bibliography.--jmb
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: IGNE--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621,
Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $3.00. A series of 20 short poems,
mostly alternating very short with longer lines, using words and
word fragments from a variety of languages (I've identified
English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek). Often the
result is a kind of multi-linguistic haiku, but breaking down the
conventional patterns of haiku-thought or perception as well as
successfully challenging the notion that a single language (at a
time) is necessary for coherent poetic discourse: "Luce in arte/
Err/ We affects/ Will pais paizon young idiot." (from "igne 18")
This work clearly demonstrates that poetry need not be confined to
a particular cultural or literary context to be successful, and
that poetic thought occurs in a consciousness of language as a
generic category and not simply as a particular culturally-bound
construct.--jmb
Poetry of extreme invention, the song of a mind able to hear
music from many spheres simultaneously. Language here serves that
open interior melody--mind occupied with the frontiers of inspired
intelligence. Bits of words, sentences, languages, physical
apparitions intermingle in a mathematics that delivers a new
series of interpretations with each pass. This is a poetry of
ultimate mystery, an honest confrontation of reality without the
safety of the filters we usually project. Its size is perfect for
slipping in your pocket so you can dip into it for a taste of
infinity--to remind you that the world we live in is by consensus-
-to remind us of the cracks in its construction.--jb
Larry Tomoyasu: RADIO ELECTRONICS, Found Street--14492 Ontario
Cir., Westminster CA, 92683. 16 pp., $1.00. Larry Tomoyasu
specializes in interestingly unsettling combinations (but not
collages) of texts and visual images. In Radio Electronics, a
sequence of such works, he uses a typed narrative, cursive
annotations about the devil as "a non-existent radio station," and
(slightly distorted, over-exposed, out-of-context) snapshots of
people and places to explore dream-reality versus waking reality.--bg
Wilber Topsail: THE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF PANTYHOSE AND THE POEMS OF
MIDDLE AGE--Erstwhile Press, 2116 Spring Hill Dr., South Bend IN,
46628. 76 pp., $7.95. The title provides apt description of the
mood and content of these poems which, as the back cover blurb
states, are "flashbacks of a chaotic internal revolution called
Growing Up Male." The poems are driven by frustration and
fascination with the sexuality of an aging man and his
observations on consumer- and youth-oriented society. Content and
language are often sensual. A few of the poems rhyme, but the
rhyme is never overbearing. "Fashion" is on of the shortest poems
and is somewhat representative: "I used to make/ love more often/
than I wore a tie." Even though you probably won't think about
them much afterward, these poems are accessible, relevant to other
people, and fun to read.--mg
Bill Tuttle: EPISTOLARY: FIRST SERIES--Meow Press, 334 Bryant St.
#7, Buffalo NY, 14222. $5.00. A series of letters written during
phases of the moon, haunted by its always partial light. Quietly
jagged and intense. The pain of this book is the knowledge that
the other we address is always the terror of our own imagination,
that there may be finally no one to hear us. The hope of this
book is that our fragments remain a source of wonder.--mw
Without sentimentality the poetry in this book conveys, via a
form of epistle, a subtle beauty and human delicacy. This is not
the tired narrative of frank encounter. This poetry is Language
based in its theory. In these poems there are cracks in the
opaque use of language. It is the sheer within the poetry which
allows the sensual facet of language a presence. There is a voice
in the sound of words.--mb
Thomas Vaultonburg: CONCAVE BUDDHA--Press of the Third Mind, 65 E.
Scott St., Chicago, IL, 60601. 58 pp., $5.95. Chicago isn't a
pretty town. People get tossed against walls, robbed at gun
point, bashed in so many ways it's amazing that so many can
survive. But Vaultonburg captures this wilderness in cat fights,
Auschiwitz Ribs, umbilical cord nooses, schizophrenic paranoias,
sex-filled jazz hallucinations, and so many other bitter ugly
dreams that you want to stop, turn the world off, and hang your
head in silence.--o
Mark Wallace: COMPLICATIONS FROM STANDING IN A CIRCLE--Leave
Books, 57 Livingston St., Buffalo NY, 14222. 70 pp., $5.95. Mark
Wallace writes out of the specifics of this place and time,
"dishrags," "parking lots," and "fat mad cats." But this is a
critical poetics of the everyday. The signifying practices which
might have been used behind the scenes to construct the poet's
authentic voice and experience are instead foregrounded and
questioned in Wallace's poetry. So his poetics remains committed
to the ordinary while denying it its ideologically privileged
status of "real life." This is a position very difficult to
negotiate: the reified notions of "authenticity" and "real life"
are so dominant in the US--and so commercially useful, too--that
few poets of the ordinary avoid them, while poets who try to
reject this ideology may substitute a practice so deliberately
artificial and restricted that it ends up affirming "real life"
after all. Wallace's negotiations employ Language writing
practices; in particular, he is interested in sound as a material
property of language. Sound associations and chime-rhymes often
carry on the forward movement of his lines, derailing
referentiality; the sounds do not fit the sense but undermine it.
I also find a strong poetic persona in these lines, but not as a
"voice"; instead, the persona draws its strength from its
submergence and dispersal in the social matrix of language.--cp
Ben Watson: 28 SILVERFISH MACRONIX, OUT TO LUNCH--Equipage, c/o
Rod Mengham, Jesus College, Cambridge, ENGLAND, CB5 8BL. $5.00?
Twenty-eight poems of varying lengths, including drawings and
graphics. The poems move in a kind of intense paranoic
surrealism, with a sarcastic slant in the word-play they delight
in. This is lively work, and I hope to see more from Watson:
"...the fishnets/ stop at the white flesh, and it sure/ looks good
on you. toblerone faucet/ by the nursery chaperone, belted/ kids
breaking wind like a cat bush" (from "2").--jmb
Don Webb: THE SEVENTH DAY AND AFTER--Wordcraft of Oregon, PO Box
3235, La Grande OR, 97850. 78 pp., $7.95. Don Webb is one of
those rare writers who can leap tall genres in a single bound.
Whereas most avant-writers avoid genre-writing like the plague,
Webb absorbs them into his Central Processing Unit and encodes
them with his ultra-wry wit and open imagination. The result is a
cross between J.G. Ballard, Steve Katz, H.P. Lovecraft and Misha.
This new collection of fictions, The Seventh Day and After,
features some of Webb's weirdest stories yet. Of special notice
is the story "Protocols of Captain Whizzo," where Webb satirizes
the stereotypes of children's TV programming to the point of Ubu
Roi-like absurdity. Accompanying the text are odd illustrations
by Roman Scott.--ma
Paul Weinman & Wendy Duke: ALLY ALLY HOME FREE--Dumpster Press, PO
Box 80044, Akron OH, 44308. $2.00. The statement that poetry and
politics don't mix is too general to be true or false; but that's
what you'll find yourself trying to decide as you read this. The
poems often name large concepts, such as the American Dream, to
plainly state that poverty sucks and the poor stay poor while the
rich get richer.--mg
James Welsh: AUTO-DA-FE--Wray, PO Box 91052, Cleveland OH, 44101.
$2.00. This artifact is a bag full of ashes from a collection of
doomed manuscripts submitted to the furnace. With some
interesting quotes on fire and burning. Perhaps this is the book
to accompany the Haters' "Fire" or "Oxygen Is Flammable". A
worthwhile artifact.--ar
Rupert Wondolowski: SHINY PENCILS--Shattered Wig Prods, 2407
Maryland Ave. Apt. #1, Baltimore MD, 21218. 30 pp., $3.00. A
new collection in which Wondolowski continues to develop his
unique visceral surrealism: the poems are intense, playful,
melancholic, sardonic, and intelligent: "Your bunghole with chives
would be a treat and a surprise as the buildings crumble like
teeth. A tropical winter with leaders brain dead, the monkey
pulls the blind man on a blood spattered sled." (from "Shiny
Pencils") These excellent poems vary from the long and expansive
to the short and allusive, and are accompanied by surrealist
comic-like drawings by Mok Hossfeld.--jmb
This adorable bright-yellow chapbook should be made into a
film by Cronenberg or Lynch, or a billboard for Casa de
Rachmaninoff Music Box and Nose- piercing Boutique. I blushed when
I read the words: "I saw you outside the convenience store and you
looked so beautiful." Wondolowski is lyric and personal. And
still, he knows how to motivate the soft-machine scientist in me with such works as "researchers are growing hair in a test tube"
and "that night we played the mole game (for China and Clover)."
Ghastly but deliciously hairball.--ssn
Jeff Zenick: MODERN HISTORICALITY #1--PO Box 877, Tallahassee FL,
32302. 32 pp. Down-home drawings and prose from a journal Jeff
kept of a jaunt through Florida that he made in 1991--walking and
by bicycle. His drawings are cleanly craftsmanlike, flavorful and
absolutely authentic renditions of such subjects as a chick feed
factory; one Hardee's interior, and another Hardee's exterior; an
Eckerd's up against a Publix; people enjoying a seafood festival.
His writing is similarly appealing.--bg
Jeff Zenik: MUCK DUCK--PO Box 877, Tallahassee FL, 32302. 32 pp.
A comic book about aliens who try to capture a dorky earthling
during his exciting morning having breakfast (and taking a leak)
at a diner and then buying a soda at a liquor store. The story is
enjoyable enough but Jeff's drawing here seems awkward.--bg
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End TapRoot Reviews Issue #4.0, section b: Chaps. 2/94
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