Three Micro-Reviews

* Rodney Koeneke

The Thorn, by David Larsen, exists in a prickly, unsettling space between the
modern diss and the ancient curse, urban graffiti and antique inscription,
that David Larsen’s staked out as uniquely his own. Printed poems exist
alongside Sharpie scrawl, photographs, drawings of numbers, and renegade
photocopies that take this book well beyond the run-of-the-mill poetry
collection to suggest a deeper meditation on the nature of signs. Larsen
leavens the history with huge dollops of humor–poems like “Fifty Pizzas,”
“Bride of Pancakes,” “Death by Vanilla,” and “Charlton Heston Presents
the Bible” are closer in attitude to Dr. Dre than Derrida–but the phantom
limb of orality that haunts all our books pricks just as insistently for that.
“Haunting” for once is maybe a good word to describe this collection, not for
the sentimental pyrotechnics the term usually implies (expelling of breath at
exquisite last line), but for Larsen’s ability to take writing back to its originary
functions of magic, spell, imprecation, and invoker of unseen powers while
keeping the idiom firmly America circa ‘06. For news that stays news on the
fate of the word, you could do worse than turn to The Thorn.

BOOK INFO
The Thorn, David Larsen
Faux Press, 
Paperback,  pages
$ .
I S B N : ---

253
Do you ever get those light scratches in your DVD that confuse the laser for a
second, creating these weird halts and pixilations in the action? The poems
in Drew Gardner’s Petroleum Hat do that with the standard lyric ‘I’, U.S. war
culture, and the English language itself to create an experiment in sound
that catches the unique squelch of America circa now. Gardner’s found
a way to make poems that look fresh & new as an aerial view on Google
Earth while tapping into the more familiar energies of pop culture. With
titles like “The Indian Government is in the Band Gwar,” “A Copy of The
Koran Written in Rootbeer,” “The US Is Turkey and Humanity,” “John
Denver Wawa Shadow Puppet Government,” and (personal favorite) “Art
Licker,” it’s hard to go wrong, and the innards are just as imaginative (“I’ll
be the one flying the flaming fetus kites”). Petroleum Hat samples the insanity
of the -hour media feed and puts it to work–for a change–for art. Protest
too, via satire and absurdity, but also art. Gardner’s poems, in their wry
outrageous way, are beautiful, full of an overloaded kind of st-century
beauty I haven’t quite heard anywhere else. I came for the laughs but stayed
for the life information.

BOOK INFO
Petroleum Hat, Drew Gardner
Roof Books, 
Paperback,  pages
$ .
I S B N : ---

254
Bay Poetics is the singular achievement of Oakland poet and editor Stephanie
Young, who climbed an immense circus ladder with all eyes upon her, gazed
steelily from the platform, and jumped into space assured a trapeze would
be there to find her when she reached out. Two years in the making, and
published just in time for the earthquake centenary, Young’s anthology
shakes up different lines and schools to offer a unique stratigraphy of San
Francisco and environs at the edge of the st century. It’s a collection no
one else could have assembled, but one I think people will be looking back
to for years to come. Here in San Francisco it already feels indispensable
for anyone seriously involved with poetry. I hope Young’s coralling of 
writers from across the experimental spectrum breaks into the sunlight of
wider attention to prove what you’ve always suspected: that the Bay Area’s
no more (or less) than a collective state of mind.

BOOK INFO
Bay Poetics, Stephanie Young, ed.
Faux Press, 
Paperback,  pages
$.
I S B N : ---

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