Microreview: On "Nocturnal Omissions" by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard and Eric Norris

  

There's something inherently weak in a critic who refers to something as a "guilty pleasure."  You can't help but imagine what pressures are weighing on them to feel they have to qualify their liking in such a guarded way.  With Nocturnal Omissions: A Tale of Two Poets, Eric Norris and one-time porn star Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, have written a pseudo-autobiographical epistolary novel-in-verse comprised of frenetic, bawdy emails written during a two month period.  Why feel guilty liking it?

The book begins with the poem "La Fin de Temps" in which Dillard boldly declares his intentions: "I want to supplant your blood with my sperm and/plant a garden of teeth upon island and crest."  The next page features a response poem by Norris called "The Day of the Apocalypse."  Here's a sample: "I creep forward like the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, smelling my way to Dover.".  And then Galvin's reply appears as the next poem "Petit Dejeuner au Lit."  One of the lines asks "...will a hot stream of piss be mine and a fleshy scone of rubicund jam?"

Nocturnal Omissions might be one of the more intriguing books of 2011.  Not quite camp, not quite comedy, it feels (sort of) like an extended in-joke-- except one that you do weirdly want to part of. Sometimes the experience is like watching a really amazing high-school variety show; it's sloppy, and you spend a lot of time simply admiring their gusto, waitng for them to stumble into the next fun bit. Sometimes it can take a bit too long to come, but you know it will.  This book is even as overlong as most of those shows-- as it should be-- part of the fun is their refusal, conscious or not, to conform through compression.  They feel entitled to their space and their excess, the thought of acquiescing to someone else's rules doesn't even seem to occur to them.  It's 165 pages, and you get the sense they wouldn't mind if you didn't go straight from beginning to end.  Go ahead and wander around.  Do what you want.

The pronouncements of love and lust ("But you, precious halfling, when you grin and dance before me, even the possums mumble how tasty you might be in a pie or stew") makes the humor endearing in an uncommon way.  You get the sense they're writing parody, or self-parody, or something reminiscent of an idea of parody, but you're not quite sure.  The call-and-response poems document the minutiae of gay life ("I wore a wife-beater out in public today, for the first time in some years--the diet has worked"), possibly sincere philosophy ("Love is a misnomer, for it implies duality, purports two disparate parts intertwined"), and critiques of well-known contemporary poets ("I do like dogs.  I detest Mark Doty.")..along with other things ("This week I had implanted my first bionic tooth--a titanium screw into my lower mandible; I have felt no pain...).

When you read lines like "Don't think me cynical if I find love incredible," you can't help but read this as a warning to the critic.  in fact, the book transforms itself into something critic-proof.  When they reference Sappho, Housman ("the best"), and Shakespeare, you don't feel the allusion are a nod to the audience, an insistence for approval, like the kind of poem the University of Chicago press goes ga-ga for.  It's thrown into the poem because they felt like throwing it in; they like books because they do, not because they should.

As Bryan Borland's still new Sibling Rivalry Press (already highly regarded) continues to take off, you can't help but hope he doesn't begin to only publish more mainstream authors, like the precocious Saeed Jones and the established Matthew Hittinger, but also takes in what ultimately be the more unexpected projects from people who don't seem to have MFAs or the most embarrassing sort of Ph.D. (yes, you can still purchase one in creative writing if your multiple-choice skills are intact.)  Flawed and wholly undisciplined as it may be, perhaps an integral part of its strength, the unstoppable joy of writing surfaces in Noctural Omissions, which is perhaps the most radical act of all.

Gavin Dillard's and Eric Norris' Nocturnal Omissions: A Tale of Two Poets is available through Sibling Rivalry Press.

Microreview: On Neil De La Flor's and Maureen Seaton's "Sinead O' Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds"

Neil De La Flor's and Maureen Seaton's Sinead O' Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds is the kind of poetry book that most often never wins awards: it's too creative.  Their collaborative effort does something most authors working together don't have the gumption to do: refuse to tidy up their poems in a way that everything becomes seamless and you're left saying to yourself, "This poem feels like it's written by one person.  Everything is of a piece."  What's the point of reading a collaboration if it doesn't feel messy, busting open with too much talent?  Why believe less is more?  Sometimes more is more.  For good reason.

The rambling, blessedly moronic litanies are obviously perfect vehicles for collaboration.  They makes lists and a lot of other things.  You can imagine a pair of poets trying to outshine the other as yet another burst of creativity jettisons its way through the Internet.  However they divvied up the work for their collaboration is ultimately irrelevant.  What matters is the end results, and this book is so wonderful.  Take a look at some of the zingers.  Here's one from "Metempsychosis": "I believed ellipses were Lilliputian prints of panini recipes"   Another from "Words of Mouth": "They say Beethoven's maid died of lead poisoning.  If she ate paint, it would be a thread of gold through turquoise, swan's blood, a violin silence." Or the entirety of "The Archaeology of Christendom": "The sorest spot on my head is a temple./I have bra cups in multiple sizes."

These brilliant comics know every joke is ultimately a throwaway, every poem a vehicle for urgent nonsense. 

Neil De La Flor's and Maureen Seaton's Sinead O' Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds is available through Firewheel Editions.

Microreview: On Andrew Demcak's "Night Chant"

Consciously oppressive and morose, Andrew Demcak's new book of poetry Night Chant labors to create what could in lesser hands seem like a queer rewriting of Sylvia Plath.  Demack knows better, although he, too, creates a dreary atonality through intriguing word choices.  Often the work he does here feels strained, but in a good way; he doesn't want any of his triggers to produce a baldfaced narrative.  The titles of his poems --"Rent Boy," "Crossing the Water," "Troll," "Child Killer"-- seem irrelevant; they feel like a random noun someone uttered to rev Demcak up to show his skill.  And there's more than a solid amount of ability here.

For a significant portion of the book, Demcak strains to deconstruct a noun, and then asks us to help him reassemble it.  In the better poems, we feel the labor of that strain--the diction and metaphor pushing the subject in a way that force it to become something one can perceive as new.  Here's some of the fun play in the personae poem "Oedipus Rex": "His lips had lost their sphinx,/ that tired jinx, that nag./...Midnight's middle was not an empty room./My cock was the answer to the riddle."  Or the curiously askew final couplet in "Orgasm vs. Rainbow": "Orgasms are bluster, quick mouthfuls, ogling eyes./But you have rainbows for days after denouncing the clouds."

Occasionally, he doesn't feel like he's straining quite enough; he doesn't deserve the release.  For example, in the less striking poem "Eros": "Inferno, bright flame, the spasm of flesh./ Halos blazing sparks ignite: orgasm."

Demcak's book sometimes feels over-long (close to ninety pages); the exertion required for reading such a lengthy book feels slightly greedy, especially since some of the poems like "Mirror at Forty" and "In Solitude" could be easily edited to highlight some of the best like "Eavesdropper, 1990" and the daring "Mishima Fantasy.".  But still, it's hard to find any place in the the book where there is anything that resembles "a merciless desert here, this page."

Andrew Demcak's Night Chant is available through Lethe Press.

Microreview: On Hansa Bergwall and Timothy Liu's "The Thames & Hudson Project"

You could say that Hansa Bergwall's and Timothy Liu's chapbook The Thames & Hudson Project is the best chapbook explicitly fashioned out of a queer mid-life crisis.  As they declare in the prose polemic that begins their project: "...the notches left on your belt that once made for salacious stories to aggrandize tumescent vanity feel less consequential as your body ages, as the face you greet each morning in the morning no longer speaks to the who and the what you've been for all the men you've dallied with, even written about."  In one of the most painfully beautiful poems, "You, Under My Window," we see a presumably older narrator who finds a vitality in the search for a space relieved of solipsistic desire as well as a cowardly acquiescence to the beloved.  The poem begins: "The oak turned red while you sung./How boring."  It leads to a final couplet which reads: "When my wrinkles/smoothed and my nose pugged, I ceased/being me.  Go ahead and make love/to your magic.  I am not there."

In so many vital ways, this is a book obsessed with ethical compromise.  It's elegantly instructive in how a poet can explore restlessness within the lyric: the relationship between the "I" and the "you," sex and the lust, reader and writer.  Always self-reflexive in their own deliberately melodramatic illustration of the erotic, the authors avoid easy thematics.  From the poem "Without You," the poets write: "Without you I am the diorama's/glassed-in air, the dew drop/that never falls into a time lapse photo..."  Cagey and open-hearted at the same time, Bergwall and Liu disclose their dissatisfaction with unchallenged, plain depictions of homosexual lust and sex.  What they come up is not so much solutions, but a relentless, and often comic, inquiry into the gay lyric, never losing sight of what may, in the end, be the most necessary imperative to the poet and reader.  As they write in the poem "Under Your Window, 3 AM: "Do as you will./I am here/to serenade you."

Hansa Bergwall and Timothy Liu's The Thames & Hudson Project is available through Fields Press.

Microreview: On Charles Jensen's "The Nanopedia Quick-Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture"

Almost feeling like a game of Tetris, there’s a lot of fun in watching Charles Jensen shift and slide the sounds and meanings of words in his new chapbook, The Nanopedia Quick-Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture. With suaveness, Jensen manages to create puzzles through prose poems that wind up feeling as solved as an aphorism and as open-ended as a sweet riddle.

One of his best, “Reaganomics,” begins: “The color-coding trends toward the blue collar.” It ends with bleak comedy: “Dollars trade hands. Those young boys take one for America. It’s a chaos theory: a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing; a moving car blowjob goes suddenly, horribly wrong.” Indebted to Stephen Dunn’s Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs and James Richardson’s Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten Second Essays, Jensen refuses those authors’ flat diction which always verge on sounding like a USA Today article.

Here’s where “Frenemies” begins: “Tragedy makes the shape of an O with his mouth and sooner or later, you know some teenage boy thinks, Round peg, round hole. Here’s where the same poem ends up: “...everybody loves a loose Tragedy, but comedy doesn’t get near enough play. The difference between Hamlet and Hambone.” Serio-comic, Jensen’s chapbook reveal a great aptitude for the making of worthy prose poetic games.

Charles Jensen's The Nanopedia Quick-Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture through MiPOesias.

The Holiday Spirit of Kindness and Goodwill.

Maybe the holidays are the time for cruel behavior and unexpected lashing out at attempts at cheerful comradery.  Scrooge telling carollers they should be boiled in their own pudding and the like. I guess my unwanted holiday gift was being blindsided by a particularly unexpected mean-spiritedness.  The only thing that was unusual was that it was by another gay poet --one I respect and have vigorously supported in the past.  I wouldn't address this at all, except for the fact that I've rather cruelly been placed in a public position where I have to defend myself somewhat not on terms of my art but on terms of the personal. 

For me, Facebook is an opportunity to be silly and also to convey messages in an expedient way, especially when you're bored and have nothing much to do (like the holidays).  For three years, I've had a congenial correspondence with a certain poet.  In those three years on this blog, while I more often spend time promoting and praising interesting and new gay poets (as those who actually read my posts rather than skimming them for negativity or taking someone else's word for what I do here will know), but I've sometimes written reviews of books where I found them middling to fair to not-my-cup-of-tea (note, that's the books or poems, not the authors themselves--  I don't write about people who don't in some way interest me or who I respect, even if I don't always personally like every single piece that flows from their pen). Over that time, this person wrote me a number of responses, often affirming my decision to do so, in both personal emails and Facebook messages.

A few days ago, though, I wrote a status update in which I joked that I was bored and that I needed to get off Facebook or I would start "harrassing people."  He wrote comments on my Facebook account which encouraged me in a charming way to stay on and that I should do so (i.e., my joke about "harassing" people).  It was a fun thing to see.  Then afterwards he wrote as a status update on his account saying that he was drinking a glass of wine, and I said tongue in cheek, "I bet it's white, faggot"--offering what I felt to be a camp (if tired) response.  In case it's not obvious, I'm not a straight person, nor a high school jock bullying Kurt from "Glee," nor Tracy Morgan threatening to stab his gay son in the head. While there's a definite debate to whether gays (and other minorities) should comically "reclaim" slanderous words, it's hard to imagine that the context wasn't absolutely clear. In fact, there's a long history of prominent gays reclaiming such words comically. The name of this blog is even "Pansy Poetics."  Perhaps there's a silent contingent that feels that title's also "going too far" but in three years I have yet to hear from them, including this person who suddenly wishes to publicly chastise me as some sort of bigot.

Anyway, this person who I thought I was on good terms with said that his wine was indeed red.  Later on, we joked about something else.  I was never told during the actual conversation I was out-of-line or that my throwaway mock-Boys-In-The-Band moment offended him; if I had, I would have deleted it in a heartbeat and apologized. I don't go around spewing the word "faggot;" it's generally not my style of "camp" even if I feel like being camp.  Yesterday, though, a handful of people suddenly started writing me that this man was upset at me for some reason, and was making an issue of it on his Facebook page.  Not knowing what was up or why, I looked on his Wall and found out that I was indeed mysteriously de-befriended.

This person never wrote to me directly and said what's up.  Nothing.  Instead, I heard reports that he posted a slur on me on his account publicly stating that I "had gone too far."  Using the word "faggot," he apparently now said, was way beyond the pale for me, so, goodbye, get lost, sayonara.

I was (and still am) hurt that if he was offended he didn't just remove the post and privately tell me he felt it was misguided.  I'm not claiming we were best friends or anything, but, really.

I wrote him a response saying that I was sorry, that I thought we were being silly, and why did he not write me before he took a drastic action.  No response.  I wrote him again and gave him my phone number and said we should talk on the phone.

All I got was an email saying that I didn't know him as a person, and that word was unacceptable. His account was not a "gay bar."  It was a space for him to do professional work, among other things.  I was an interloper.  He would not change his mind.

But it's my career, too, after all.  And publicly charging me with bigotry and "going too far" while blocking me from being even able to defend myself at the source doesn't seem to me like the most "moral" or responsible behavior, either.

Needless to say, I am very hurt.  But I am not writing this post really to document this exchange, but instead to use it as a vehicle to address a concern about how some otherwise well-intended gay men cruelly marginalize others under the guise that they are acting in a moral fashion.

Any undergraduate from a Queer Studies 101 class could tell you that sometimes marginalized groups of people take back derogatory words by using them themselves--the pink triangle, for instance.  "Dykes on Bikes."  The term "Queer Studies," itself. Openly gay comics like The Kids in the Hall's Scott Thompson would go out of business overnight if the word "faggot" was verboten to gay men. Etc., etc., etc. And obviously, the role of camp comes into play, especially when talking about something as petty as drinking. 

When people have objected to something I've written it's almost always been on these grounds: be polite.   The unmistakable desire to protect middle-class etiquette is a result not of good manners, but a desire to protect the status quo, to ensure that insiders (whether it's schools, presses, aesthetic decisions, etc. etc.) maintain their control. Are we sure this isn't itself a type of homophobia-- the "behave yourself" and act like the "good" gay man? Maybe someone doesn't want profanity on their website, fair enough.  But it's the impulse here to take it farther than addressing it when it happened, removing it, and contacting me privately about it that bothers me.  Instead, it was a public upbraiding; this is what happens when you step out of line.

I'm not going to belabor the obvious, at least not here (too late, you probably say).

What shocks me in this particular case, though, is this person has almost everything one could ask for in terms of their poetry career, but suddenly feels the need to take a friendly conversation and use it to meanly clobber a friend who's an  insignificant poet with an admittedly obscure blog over the head.  There is so much fear about saying anything "negative" that the community shuts down.

I find it shocking when some gay poets claim that they don't believe in criticism, that (as I sometimes get leveled at me) critics are by their very nature just jealous writers.  My huge question to these people is, how many people are actually doing reviewing these days?  I sure as heck don't get paid for it, nor am I giving Poets & Writers a run for their money in terms of readers.  I do it because I love it, and maybe someone, somewhere might discover a work by a gay writer they hadn't seen or considered or get jazzed by discussing the merits of an established poet's recent works. And why on earth does one become a writer, if one doesn't want people to give you their take?  I feel writers want to share the excitement of finding what's new and intriguing, and sometimes discussing what doesn't work and why.  I'm not sure why anyone who just wants eternal positivity and praise should be a writer, rather than, say, becoming a cult leader instead.

I think that the reason some gay poetry can seem so homogeneous (and I will boast that I've read as much gay contemporary poetry as anyone, from the "big" books to the small ones I'm constantly seeking out, sometimes being one of the few adding to online bookstore's sales numbers) and that that's why the same aesthetic decisions and lines of inquiry can sometimes feel so much the same.

When I first started my blog, I was recovering from a serious, near-fatal depression--I needed to find ways to be more active in my attempts to find community.  I think that a lot of people are too cynical about social media.  I have found over the years that Facebook, for instance, has enabled me to be friends with people that I otherwise never would have met.  Starting a blog about queer poetics also introduced me to a slew of gay men who were now people I was corresponding with.  When I was depressed, it was about the same time I published my first book; for some reason, I felt words didn't matter.  They didn't yield anything.  Connecting people in such an immediate and expedient way restored that faith.

I never expected anyone to read the blog.  Why would they?  All I was doing was writing about books of poetry by fellow gay men.  I quickly found out when I shared an ambivalence about a gay poet that people do read a blog.  I know from the Sitemaster that my blog has been read by more people than anything else I've ever written.  That's not saying much, but, hey.

When the blog began, almost immediately, I received angry emails from gay men: how dare you criticize other gay men?  There's more than enough people already against us.  I could talk about which works I liked and loved and was happy to discover all I liked until I was blue in the face, but if I said something negative, it got all the attention, emails, comments, etc. Rarely did some of these responders want to discuss the specifics of a particular criticism if there was a criticism in a review, but instead wanted to talk about what a "negative" person I was being.   Regardless, for me, open discussion has always been a good thing.

To come full circle, for what it's worth, I said a lot of good things about this poet who won't now talk to me.  I felt though the need to make myself transparent, and thought that it would be more conducive for myself and the queer community, whatever that is, to provoke and get a more genuine conversation going.

Over the years, I have found out a number of things.  Once I made an attempt to read all the Lambda award nominees in Gay Male Poetry--I corresponded with the poets who were up for the award.  It shocked me that many of them said they hadn't read any of their competitors' books.  Wasn't anyone simply curious?  Instead of criticizing one another in a circa-1970's style circular firing squad conversation about the pros and cons of minorities "reclaiming" slurs like the F-word, why don't we encourage everyone to support our gay literary community by genuinely buying, reading, and actively and energetically discussing the works?

Needless to say, as if it bears repetition, how much I am dismayed that someone who I've talked to over the years, sent emails to, received emails back from, talked about other poets with (the same poets I wrote about publicly) but would just cut me loose over a dumb joke that might as well be gathering dust in the eight-million- gay-men-have-used-variations-of-it hall of fame.

I don't think that's the crime though.  In past emails he said that he wanted to hang out with me at AWP, but he said, jokingly, it might "hurt" his reputation.  If one wants to talk about a degrading, demeaning, and inappropriate "joke," one might start there. What did I do that I'm a risk to someone's reputation?  I kept a blog documenting my opinions about gay art.  (And I buy all the books by gay poets myself.  Only four times in three plus years did I receive a copy, and even then, I always made sure to buy yet another copy to support the press.) 

The fact that an unknown poet like myself could pose a threat shows how bad the situation is.  I've always wanted to be a part of a community that provides checks and balances to one another--why else write about other books? Anyway, sorry if I've inconvenienced anyone's reputation.  To paraphrase Scrooge, perhaps I should just be de-friended and decrease the surplus population.

Happy Holidays!

On the Lambda Literary Awards, Saeed Jones, Aaron Smith, and Glenn Sheldon

Dear Mr. Richard Labonte,
 

I recently read a mass email that you sent out, saying that you extended the December 1 deadline for submissions to the annual Lambda Literary Awards.  You reported that you would be contacting publishers who you thought had worthy entries.  There are three poetry books that I feel need to be entered.  I am afraid that because they are chapbooks and not full-length that their publishers might feel reluctant to enter them.  Chapbooks are often marginalized and often unfortunately seen as merely a gateway to a full-length book.  I feel that they should be considered as a self-contained product.  That's why I believe Sibling Rivalry Press, Winged City Chapbooks c/o. New Sins Press, and Rocksaw Press should be contacted.  They each produced a fine chapbooks that I feel could easily become a finalist.  The three chapbooks include Saeed Jones' "When the Only Light is Fire," Aaron Smith's "Men in Groups," and Glenn Sheldon's "Biography of the Boy who Prays to the God of Foreheads."  Please don't marginalize chapbooks.  (If Frank Bidart's chapbook "Music Like Dirt" can be a finalist for the Pulitzer surely these chapbooks could be at the very least considered for a Lambda.)  Immediately below are my microreviews of these works.

                                                         ***

Much anticipated, Saeed Jones’ chapbook When the Only Light is Fire lives up largely to its hype, particularly the first half.  Stand-outs include the personae poem “Kudzu” (“And if I ever strangled sparrows/it was only because I dreamed/ of better songs”) and “Boy Stolen Evening Gown” (“I waltz in an acre of bad wigs.”)  His deftly compressed series of poems about the murder of James Byrd, Jr. act as an affirmation and a successful extension of Lucille Clifton’s famous work, “jasper texas 1998”  Who could forget her line: “I am a man’s head hunched in the road./I was chosen to speak by the members/of my body.”?  Here on his own terms, Jones writes with a similar defiance in “Jasper, 1998: I”: ...”but I speak/(tongue slick with iron)/but I speak/in the language of sharp turns.”   His very few less successful poems deal with bad sex, jilted lovers, dark lonely nights.    There, he ditches his technique, strong line breaks, sharp turns of phrase, for baroque setting.  Take the poem “Room 31”: “Cigarette smoke/is the smell of the last couple here,/the ghost of their stains/still/on the sheet,..”  More of a sign of youth than anything I bet, these minimal, disposable scenes will be replaced no doubt by more earned and honorable sadness.  Regardless, don’t miss out on this exciting debut.

Saeed Jones' When the Only Light is Fire is available through Sibling Rivalry Press.

                                                   ***

I was not a fan of Aaron Smith’s first book Blue on Blue Ground.  It felt canned and amateurish. (“There’s a different kind of loneliness/in the city, one of thousands of people rushing away/...and streets that at night are forbidden like desire.”)  Over the years, I’ve been reading his new work online, and have been awed by his transformation into one of our more accomplished comic poets.  One of my favorites is his inspired rewrite of  Berryman’s Dream Song 14, “Life, friends, is boring.”  Here’s an excerpt from the poem called “Open Letter”: “Your choice of socks is boring.  (So is the way you walk!)  You eat boring bagels with butter (not cream cheese) and your breath reeks with boring, boring coffee and morning stink.”  Not only here, but in a number of other places in the book, he proves himself to be the master of the parenthetic expression, using them to provide an odd, inspired sincerity.  The closure of the poem “Hurtful” reads: “...I hate you/more for: That you can eat French fries/and not exercise.That everyone you let/be close to you has to need/you.  Strangers gawking/because you’re radiant (and you are radiant!)”  By far, my favorite poem in the book is “Diesel Clothing Ad (Naked Man with Messenger Bag)” which is essentially an ekphrasis at heart: “So what if the woman’s hand reaching/for the bag pulls the bag/back and we see his dick,/that one ball hangs lower/than the other,that he shaves them.  So what.  So what..."  The poem continues to use stanza breaks, spacing, and anaphora to embody the motion of the bodies in the actual ad.  The only criticism I have is his unfortunate use of the second-person from time to time.  Smith is too gentle a poet to succeed in such a control move.  You can feel him overextending, which results in a cuteness and an unsuccessful sadistic gesture.  We don’t want to live out his occasionally frivolous clichés.  From his poem “Lucky,” Smith writes: “Who knew they’d punish you for knowing/your turquoise shirt went perfectly/with black sweatpants and turquoise/Chuck Taylors?”  All in all, Smith’s chapbook is full of some of the most inspired comedy of the year.

Aaron Smith's Men in Groups is available through Winged City Chapbooks co/New Sins Press.

                                        ***

 

Admirably eerie, at times angry, and other times necessarily sentimental, Glenn Sheldon’s Biography of the Gods of Foreheads freaked me out in the best sense.  In this current, troubled moment of history, we often overlook the power of allegory.  Only a poet as skilled as Sheldon can triumph over ‘war-worn amnesiac bats.’   The book is divided into six sections, each one revealing more nuance to his inquiry into youth, artistic process, and an abstracted politics.  Unlike so many books of poetry, Sheldon refuses to write flat journalism.  The book feels influenced by someone like Jeanette Winterson, blending a sort of magic realism with unrestrained metaphor.  As Sheldon writes: “The boy’s attic shrinks into the space of this poem, still size of a room with green flourishes of jungle,/industry of generational anarchy./The pages are  chiseled...”  By the end, the boy finds himself: “Deeper into himself but flying higher, desired/as an image to be stained in glass, he occurs:/epiphany of currency and blood’s sexy blues.”  Sheldon’s words are never ‘too fast, too flung,’  His words and the ‘fantastically small spaces between them’ broke my heart-- and mended it, too.

Glenn Sheldon's Biography of the Boy who Prays to the God of Foreheads is available through RockSaw Press.