Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse.

Effing Press 2006.

Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse opens with a poem titled “I Love Literature” which begins with the lines “I was attacking Culture. / I have seen her and she is so big and beautiful.” and ends with the lines “Yes, I love Literature / but what I love about it is / the reproductive organs of Capital.” From this you get the idea that what you are dealing with here is not your average lyric poem but something much more complex and troubling, something recognizable but strange, something brutal.

The poems and collages in this collection exist in a world where “Bunnies occupy the same / semantic field as question-begging” (“Travail Mechanique”), a world where “catastrophe is convention” and the old ones “fold / unfold their metal chairs” (“Brute”). Concerns vary from the production of pleasure to money and possessions to Stockholm Syndrome to brotherhood. There is a delight in the unexpected directions the poems take you, a delight in the vocabulary and lists: “romantic themes, a series of stalls, plagues, spacesuits, and tales of insurrection” (“Brotherhood”), “baseball, tom cats, hinges” (“Journal of the Plague Hour”). While tackling large ideas/themes, craft is not neglected—the poems are characterized by sharp line breaks and an attention to sound.

In Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse there is a battle taking place—the attack on Culture—the push and pull of language, the muskrat collaged with Guy DeBord, a fight against the “same bland cinema: everywhere, here” (“Priapism). In “Great Matrix/small year” Boyer writes: “I write like bards & Vikings.”

Arlo Quint’s Days On End.

Open 24 Hours 2006.

Arlo Quint’s new chapbook, Days On End, is a single poem/serial poem that begins with a collaged epigraph attributed in the notes to eleven different writers and ends with eight lines from Titus Lucretius Carus. Falling in between is a mind moving through the days, experiencing a city/life/life in a city, recording the interior landscape, and referencing everything from Ovid to the Velvet Underground, When Animals Attack, and A&E Biography—“monuments of perception / taking a big bite”.

There is a great mind at work here creating one unexpected phrase after another, making sharp observations—an eye/I that had to be there “to see the full range.” Not only is there delight in the imagination/selection of the phrases, but there is also delight in the attention to sound: “slumped over middle-aged / frenzies rolled into good old days”. The rhythm infects the poem, and the momentum builds until it reaches a standstill/death at the end when “everyone and I stopped breathing / we stopped walking / stopped talking / stopped seeing.”

Drawing from the New York School tradition, this is a poem that is alive—you can feel the pulse. The last line of the epigraph reads “the surface is beautiful because the surface is breathing”, and so it goes for Days On End. The surface is beautiful because the surface is breathing:

turn ambiance into shit

scientists can’t even understand

basic facts transmitting

across a nerve synapse

wrecking all tomorrow’s parties

holographic mind theories

just a crazy dream

involving ways around words

in a greater landscape

I never learned to visit

wouldn’t want to live there

deficient and defiling memory

Kristen Hanlon’s Proximity Talks.

Noemi Press 2005.

This slim collection, weighing in at eight poems spread over fourteen pages, speaks from the edge of scenes through storyboard constructions, glimpsing daily events and world views. Poems come out of nowhere and are quickly gone, sometimes falling into the emptiness at the bottom of the page as in the opening poem “The Dark Hum of Not Touching” which ends with a colon followed by nothing: “this is a hymn dedicated to:”

Throughout the poems there are several forces at work—the need to define and categorize, the constant return of memory, the final acceptance of learning to love a future that is “Just Getting By” (“Painter’s Holiday”)—all captured in sharp descriptions and concise language. The poems are not minimalist in the traditional sense, but are in a language that is pared down to its essentials. Moods vary from dark, as in “Of Course I Will Force the Flower,” where grief is defined as “the static between stations, / as brutal mediatrix”, to light and playful, as in the poem “Klamath and No Trout” whose form, using headers with brief musings following each, recalls Tender Buttons even before reaching the rather Steinien line following “Mosquitoes”: “Very fine and very mine is my Calamine.” The voice of these poems is sure of itself even as it asks “Is it wrong, this constant returning” (“Your Strong Mind”). The poet turning and returning in language and in memory.