What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week: <\/strong><\/p> Poems! I am as a wet t-shirt contest participant in MTV TRL Spring Break 2001, and enjambed lines are coming at me out of a fire hose (not always with stanza breaks, either). The nipple-obscuring text on my increasingly translucent tank top reads EXTINCTION LEVEL<\/em> by Amorak Huey, BOOM BOX <\/em>by Amorak Huey, and The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You<\/em>, pages 302-383, lines 12,040-15,283, by Frank Stanford. <\/p> EXTINCTION LEVEL <\/strong><\/em>by Amorak Huey: <\/strong>what a perfect chapbook. Love, climate change anxiety, and short short poems. At AWP, I was keeping Han company while Amorak did a panel, they picked up this book, and we just started oohing and aahing over various poems and couldn\u2019t stop. These poems are so readable. I told Amorak it would be a book\u2014sort of like a mirror image of Matthew Rohrer\u2019s They All Seemed Asleep<\/a><\/em>\u2014that I would read in one sitting before starting a day of writing. Last Saturday, I did exactly that in one 10-minute stationary bike session. I\u2019ll probably do it again tomorrow. Here\u2019s a whole poem, imagine stanza breaks after the first and third lines: <\/p> \u201cArs Poetica\u201d <\/p> The words need context.<\/em><\/p> The world is on fire and I can\u2019t stop<\/p> thinking about love. <\/p> What other context is there? <\/p><\/blockquote> BOOM BOX<\/strong><\/em> by Amorak Huey: <\/strong>the book preceding Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy<\/a> <\/em>also deals heavily with heavy family issues. The speaker of these poems navigates cheating at Monopoly while his parents\u2019s marriage is falling apart, anxieties at Little League, the mundanities of small-town Alabama, and growing-up-in-the-80s nostalgia. You would think, as a former Cracked.com<\/em> contributor, that I might be burned out on 80s nostalgia, but man, I loved these poems. Amorak is not necessarily a narrative<\/em> poet, these are definitely lyrics (complimentary), but he is really great at telling a story in a few lines. He also ends poems really strikingly, as in\u2014I\u2019ve written before about how the titles of poems are often hard for me to remember? Well, more than a couple of Amorak\u2019s last lines stick in my brain. Absolutely check this one out. Sometime in the future, I will read BOOM BOX<\/em> and Dad Jokes<\/em> back-to-back, because they are excellent books about different types of and stages in fatherhood. <\/p> The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You <\/strong><\/em>by Frank Stanford, pages 302-383, lines 12,040-15,283: <\/strong>okay. I read Battlefield<\/em>. It was an EXPERIENCE. When I was reading Homer last year, there were parts of both texts I kinda just had to power through, especially The Iliad<\/em>. A lot of Battlefield<\/em> is like that. I could not tell you who was speaking half the time, what Frank\u2019s mission in writing it was, any kind of \u201cit\u2019s about God kicking Satan outta Heaven, obstensibly, but underneath it all, it\u2019s really about Milton\u2019s complicated feelings on the regicide he helped facilitate.\u201d1<\/a> There were times, reading, when I wondered if maybe things have gone too far. If maybe 15,000+ lines of unpunctuated poetry with no stanza breaks and heavy Southern dialect2<\/a> was too much. Life is short in general, and Frank\u2019s was tragically short. If Battlefield<\/em> was, say, 5,000 lines, could we have maybe gotten another book like The Singing Knives<\/em>? <\/p> On the very strong other hand, who the hell wants to think about utility in poetry? What an achievement this book is! I mean, Francis really goes for it, and the result is astonishing. There is such a poetic mind at work with these images and similes and the appreciation of the music of language as people speak it. That deep appreciation for common linguistic music gets at the poem\u2019s key, which is the beating heart that cares about his friends enough to pull a knife on a racist theater owner and use sign language to warn other people about cops. Our man Francis Gildart is one goddamned heroic 13-year-old\u2014there\u2019s a lot of myth-making in this poem, which I read as a conscious effort to be in conversation with other epics\u2014and he loves hanging out with outcasts and talking shit to fancy people. It\u2019s like if Jesus, Holden Caulfield, and Oskar Mazerath had a redneck baby. The end result is something to behold and marvel at, something maybe not to read all the way through all the time but something to definitely pick through when your writing brain needs an ass-kicking. Long poems remind us that the form is limitless, that we can always push push push ourselves to do something wholly new, something unlike anything that\u2019s ever existed before YET connected to those daring poets that came before. It\u2019s a beautiful thing. Idk. I think I feel about long poems the way other people feel about space travel. <\/p> BONUS FRANK EPIGRAPH (ok these are the last three lines and not only do they rip, it is so so so funny to put these lines at the end of a 15,000+ line poem)<\/p> and the first time he used the telephone he yelled the reason being <\/p> so he said because my friend is so very far away and if you think I\u2019m going<\/p> to tell you what else I saw you\u2019re crazy as hell<\/p><\/blockquote> LINKS!<\/strong><\/p> Something to listen to while you browse? We had some guy named Bob Sykora on The Lazy & Entitled Podcast <\/em>to talk about his book and decide which utopian from 19th-century U.S. deserves Worker Of The Week (Apple<\/a> | Spotty<\/a> | SoundCloud<\/a>) If you\u2019d like some music? In celebration of all the 1980sness in Boom Box<\/em>, why not some back-to-back-to-back shredding? I was gonna put Guns N Roses here\u2014Appetite For Destruction<\/em> is both named-checked in the title of a poem AND the only 80s metal album I can listen to straight through\u2014but you\u2019ve heard \u201cSweet Child O Mine.\u201d If not while casually scrolling Instagram this morning, then perhaps in the grocery store yesterday. And sure, you\u2019ve heard this song on this blog before, but not in a long time, and probably not while reading from BOOM BOX<\/em>. Grab your copy of BOOM BOX<\/em>, pick some poems to read aloud, and \u201cEgo Death\u201d by Polyphia feat. Steve Vai. <\/p>![\"EXTINCTION](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/655af453-b3e8-4934-ba64-9c04e6c2368e_4030x2186.heic\")
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