Dead Letters
Alan May
BlazeVOX, 2008
$16
Situated between abjection and negation, May’s playful minimalism explores disquieting gaps and valences in a de-centered Southern landscape, revealing various forms of poetic/cultural dementia; there’s Oedipal drama, abcedariums, a parrot named Absalom, the blank stare of aporia, whimsy as heart punch, and well, angel pee. The poems are narrative and nonsensical, but the language that remains gleefully unassimilated into larger conceptual/formal armatures glowers most insistently: "The verse consumed behemoth / as tilted the metropolis"; "By beyond deserve never mind / Me molecule Genghis Khan." Illustrations by Tom Wegrzynowski and May himself add additional doses of creepy pleasure. [Tim Earley]
Whim Man Mammon
Abraham Smith
Action Books, 2007
$12
Whim Man Mammom reveals Abraham Smith (an unearthly virtuoso of a reader) as magisterial scarecrow, addled charmer, divinator of pine and snout, anti-bowdlerizer, chirruper of harvest desire, infinitely fiddle tongued, carnal fish burglar rent with high lonesome chilblains, ravine-nerved, gasoline holy, wrought from crow caul and rakish angles, monstrous harmonica, taut and jittery in wave after wave of amens, snake-bit heaver, iridescent arsonist, stammering and coyote hopeful, Kandinsky in Wisconsin, amnesia porn flee on the leg of night, apparational folk singer in a blaze of bootlegged days, or, more simply, his is the ontology of the sacred juke. [Tim Earley]