Don Mee Chois The Morning News is Exciting mounts a two-pronged attack on the idea of history using collage/procedure and the lyric prose poem. Through collages of source texts and other procedural methods, she explores pidgin as a vehicle for the anxiety of the colonized or oppressed, the idea of news as a kind of violence, and a performed deconstruction of knowable voices. Through narrative prose lyric, she furthers the idea that a performed and personal voice locates history in a specific place, less legend and more an intractable tangle of real understandings. The arrangement of the alienating collages with the lush, easily-absorbed lyrics creates a kind of authority that performs chaos in this complicated volume of long poems.

The first section of startling, confounding rhyme fuses the pidgin with the nonsensical. Choi starts with dissonance and potentially failed meanings, perhaps to accentuate a decomposing notion of the oppressor and the oppressed:

Say No Lame!

Say no male! Say we care. Terror cant tell
And bears a crown in the kitchen, may we?
Who cares: cunt cant battle, key wont tear.
Ugly decay, care for Pa and tell, we lonely.
So jail men care, met a lavish man, met a landlord.
(Eggpisode loiter ha! Advance dont at all, assuming mellow) (3).

The opening Say no male! Say we care, signals an examination of gender relationships and a warning or omen that to speak in tongues can ward off sense: To mix languages and distort syntax can make emotion feel like a card almost obscured in a shuffle of signifiers. And that the we wants something, wants it now. But it is hard to know what in a representation of the noise of outrage and demands than actual story. Choi almost lost me in this first foray (Oh tizzy rain more) until I saw the notes for the poem placed immediately after the poem and not at the end of the book. In them, the reader learns that the poem Manegg is a homophonic translation of Manteg by Monchoschi in Cahiers de Posie and that the italicized portions are from Foucaults Discipline and Punish.

This is an interesting placement of the notes, and makes the work feel modern in the sense that it presents a puzzle as if it might be completed, as if these primary texts should provide the political value of the poem. Choi throws down a gauntlet of destroyed authority, as if whatever we might think about violence and punishment ultimately results in misunderstanding and chaos. In her procedural mode, Choi articulates, but not in her poetrys surface per se, that there is no way to know what these ideas really bring to the felt, experienced world.

Choi uses procedure to investigate the idea of the news. She quotes pidgin from actual Korean soldiers. The effect is always to highlight raw emotion rather than create a prosody or imagery. To her, voice conveys everything in its brokenness and force rather than in its words. This deconstruction simmers with violence against the historical sex trade population of women, with associative meanings like weeds, plastic bags that may or may not be used to smother the self.

Chois second long poem, Diary of Return so raises the spectre of violence against women in Korea that Choi shifts to the more anchoring mode of narrative to establish political witnessing. This mode gives the book a point of political departure more clearly than the first section. The deliberate lack of softness or embellishment allows the political to insert itself recognizably, quotably. This quote is quite graphic, so skip down if you are squeamish. Choi writes:

Yun Kum-is head was smashed with a Coca-Cola bottle. She was found dead, legs spread with the Cola bottle in her vagina and an umbrella up her anus. That is not to say empire does not endorse one planet or Fathers umbrella. On the contrary, it enforces grammaticality within and without before and after Father sprinkles white disinfectant powder on the index finger. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality… (17)

This idea of language being so violently bodily, this notion of what is almost idly said in propaganda or religion allows that the most horrific excuse-making, the most egregious use of logic disregards the needs of the human, the body, the actual. Grammar, some order that has been imposed on everyones thoughts and ways of thinking doesnt conflate the violence with an absence of sense but offers a creepy sangfroid of the matter-of-fact tone and its distortion of actual fact.

The third, eponymous poem, The Morning News is Exciting! further develops this idea of the news as over-pitched or misplaced enthusiasm:

May all weeds dislocate themselves. Girls should. I clench my fist and watch the morning news. Dandelion leaves are bitter yet tender. Girls should. Chrysanthemums are admired. Beware. The early morning news is exciting.

It shifts from a more settled narrative back to play. Choi pits a canned news voice against a desperate repetition of the phrase, the morning news is exciting, of what goes on in the lives of women and daughters. Here puns supply the relief of meaning, and the repetition soldiers the poem on.

The brightness of the news tone turns a little garish, and the woman finally cannot recall what has actually happened and so is considered, an error, an errorist. Choi manipulates sentence length and repetition to create a sense of ominous militarism, a sense of being chased by an idea that was never a real obsession, but an obligation enforced with violence. The books obsession with this phrase The Morning News is Exciting gives it an ironic brightness, taking the excitement of violence and stripping away recrimination. The excitement gains a false ring, and operates as a function of ignorance and as a habit. So when we feel something for the victims of violence related here, were reprimanded too, as somehow insincere, or the contemporary witnesses to military prostitutions horrors memorialized with a pop glare.

Chois choice (I suppose in my experience, this is all the poets choice, but if it bothers you, change the subject) of the books font looking like newspaper print, brighter or more at home with convention and feelings than the violence seems to demand. The reader is thrown off-balance in some ways, but also allowed to watch a spectacle of collage. The same disgust I sometimes feel at a conceptual art show, a visceral overload, happens here: both too much, and too little at the same time. This makes the work feel presented, and the experience of reading it feels like checking the concepts as one progresses through the text rather than being able to sink into the text. Choi seems to know this and so maintains the movement from distressed surfaces to comprehensible voice and back throughout the volume: Procedural texts like Instructions from the Inner Room and The Tower carry the sound of corporate coaxing, ad language, but feel disjointed enough that one bumps along the surfaces propelled by weariness towards the opaque gestures.

What is most satisfying, at least to this reader, are the parts of the text that reflect back to a voice that isnt making elaborate reference via notes or an appendix. Diary of a Botanist and A Journey from Neo-colony to Colony, give a performance of the personal that serves as a kind of skeleton for the book. Choi adds weight and a direct narrative about an immigrant mother obsessively cleaning a refrigerator door:

I will tell you what the parrot said to me. I will tell you botanist, a botanist, the botanist. She lives in a forest. Eucalyptus leaves never rot. How sane. Her tongue, bagged in plastic, splits. Arrived insane, she scrubs kitchen counters, cutting boards, knives, the edges of a dish rack. She scrubs the fridge daily. The door stays wet (61)

The obsessive noise in the rest of the book finally comes to a head in this scene that trains on one character. The act of being domestic shows the mother tending to and dissecting herself, bagging and storing her tongue language which doubles as meat or a meal. She thinks of the act of disinfecting as a way to survive. This obsessive cleaning also picks up the idea of the news being exciting, the new cleaning off her past, her vulnerability to harm. But always something touches you, even meat that touches the fridge door, which the poems symbols suggests might even be her own tongue, and so she is trapped in a never-ending chore. Choi makes a beautiful shift from this to what is grammatical:

She follows me, for needles pierce. A, an, the. She prefers nothing (61).

Whatever tongue can do to point, the definite articles and indefinite articles like an array of tiny needles or knifepoints, this mother stands back from the power of speaking in specifics. The generic, faceless nature of people that permeates the book here is anchored in a terrific system of symbols, and the grammaticality referred to earlier in the book, the idea of violence moving around does not connect to the individual ability to point with a definite article.

The poems Epistolary, and dear master dear Emily dear twin flower take their subjects from a entire personal literary history, a history of books allows the personal and the idea of voice to ghost through the poems without actually giving the reader a clear sense of scene as, say, a news article would. And so Choi enacts the inevitable misunderstanding of the personal in the struggle to outline history: That we can never know a voice, only certain edges of it, and attempt to be moved by it, even at the great distance of the newss distortions.

Performing multitudes, collaging voices of the oppressor and oppressed together in poetry, and allowing them to intertwine and react to one another to interrogate occupations or divisions has been happening more frequently on the subject of Asia or Asian-America since Theresa Hak Kyung Chas work Dictée. Craig Santos Peross Unincorporated Territory; Ching-In Chens The Hearts Traffic; Sarah Gambitos Matadora; Juliette Lees Underground National… These poems ask what happens when languages collide. What lurks in the gaps between. What made Chas Dictée great is that she asks what happens when the Other grieves by partly absorbing the ways of the Oppressor, slowly and incrementally. Her meanings are not always clear-cut. Chois work asks what happens when the mixing of voices and cultures is distorted by archival limitations, by the news clipping, by strict nearly voiceless collage—enacting the impenetrable qualities of history.

—Reviewed by Cynthia Arrieu-King

Kim Gek Lin Short’s work utilizes narrative devices and creates a wealth of emotional layering by keeping the story simple. Her debut full-length poetry collection The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits consists of two child-like teenage lovers, Harlan and Toland, overwhelmed by the responsibilities of their relationship, and her new chapbook Run is about a country music-loving girl named La La, who escapes crushing poverty and bizarrely antagonistic parents through fantasies of country superstardom, and who then becomes locked in a charged master/slave dynamic by a guilt-ridden pedophile named Ren. There is great complexity in both works, which comes from a layering of points of view as well as the ambiguity of reality slipping into fantasy. The Bugging Watch plays out very much as a fairytale, while Run is suffused in melodrama. There are many excellent aspects of each, but what is remarkable about both is the convincing depiction of escapism to combat the pressures of reality.

The language of fairytales has proven to be fecund ground on which to create poetry. In its three sections, The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits uses the delicate rhythms of this language to great effect without falling into preciousness or sentimentality. Like many classic fairytales, there is an undercurrent of violence in the thoughts and actions of Harlan and Toland:

“Toland said she was saving herself because she could not help thinking that when they have their baby she would find it in the kitchen bloody with her blood or bloody with knifeblood or bloody with the stenciled blood of everlasting sleep, which is why she stopped sleeping.”

Short does not necessarily linger over this imagery or why Toland would think this, instead letting the anxiety of the sentence impress itself into the reader. The anxiety continues to build, as if emanating from an unknown trauma under the otherwise placid tone:

“At first, he put her in a chair by the basement saw, and every day by the sound of sanding read to her from his biography of dolls. He read about the Saturday doll and the Sunday doll, and then he read about the Monday doll….Harlan gave her from his quiver of needles a torn piece of wool, and then he continued. He read to her about the Tuesday doll and the Wednesday doll, and then he read to her about the Doll of the Seven Cables. And Toland in her chair by the saw sat up very straight. It was nearly time for the next doll, but Toland was not ready….It was nearly time for the next doll, so Harlan with his quiver of needles gave Toland a start. But Toland still wasn’t ready.”

The intricate use of repetitions and refrains, along with the subtle inversion of sentence structure (“Toland in her chair by the saw sat up very straight”), gives the language a languid tone while adding to the story a sense of urgency and a hushed awe that transforms the anxiety of these characters to a pervasive melancholy throughout the book.

The language of the book also has elements of the surreal or fantastical from the beginning:

“There once lived like fur forgotten in a basement corner the girl who touched everything. Her body like a ball of yarn unwound and fell from the bed into the basement, from the basement into the drain, and met with many accidents, where it did touch many things.”

The power of this metaphor is such that it overtakes in our minds what it is standing in for and makes a movement out of an inanimate object, the yarn. Sometimes this has a creepy tone (“An audience comes and often Harlan enacts a beetle. If it’s bright enough he tunnels the cold wet soil beneath. In nocturne looks for children in the flour and pancake mix open under pipes in the kitchen.”). These fantastical or surreal elements that animate objects or give humanity to insects and objects, as well as the heightened attention to bizarre and sometimes macabre detail is strongly reminiscent of the short films of the Brothers Quay.

The attention to these details is such that they make The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits feel very curated, to use a term more associated with the visual arts. The broad outlines of the narrative wrapped in the language of fairytale; the way that Section Two, heavily footnoted, is focused on Harlan’s story; and Section Three is the “selections of Toland’s datebook”—all these give the work a deep sense of interiority, almost a psychodrama animating the interests, concerns, and obsessions of the poet. Sections Two (“The Bugging Watch”) and Three (“Sources: Selections from Toland’s Datebook”) have in common a preoccupation with theatricality and having an audience (“I was early felt for fame,” Toland writes), which are more fully explored in Run. However, the interiority of The Bugging Watch is very different from Short’s chapbook, and the delicate melancholy of the former will in no way prepare the reader for the hellishness of Run.

In Run, Short works with much more volatile material. The Bugging Watch, while steeped in sex and violence, is always safely tucked in fairytale. Run, at least on the surface, looks like a first-person confessional. The story is (hopefully) as fictional as The Bugging Watch, but the characters and circumstances of La La’s life are close enough to reality that the reader immediately feels there is a lot more at stake.

The dynamic between Toland and Harlan and then Toland and her mother in Section Three of The Bugging Watch mirrors La La’s struggles with Ren and her mother, and yet Run’s page count nearly equals that of the entirety of The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits. Short is able to take the structure and dynamic of the last section of her first book and sustain it at a greater length in the story of La La, who daydreams of country music superstardom amid a jealous mother, criminal father, and a life of poverty:

“There was that suitcase of records Baba brought home from work. Work was supposed to be driving typhoon-stranded tourists from airport to hotel. Work was really taking the tourists to an alley stabbing them stealing their stuff. La La’s job was to listen to the radio all day music music during typhoon season for the Royal Observatory to interrupt TRANSIT SUSPENDED. When they did she woke up Baba he went to work. La La liked to listen to music music all day she played her records. Loretta Lynn Patsy Cline Emmylou Harris beautiful cowgirls…. La La never asked or anything but one day she asked for a guitar….Her mother blared COWGIRLS DON’T HAVE FLAT FACES gave her daughter a clothespin.”

She thinks of running away, but is then either kidnapped or otherwise finds herself imprisoned by Ren, a sad-sack who is also a pedophile/murderer.

Ren is a family man when he takes La La he wants to be her father or something commensurate….The suitcase is empty but La La wears all her clothes anyway like Heidi…La La wants to impress Ren with all of her clothes on she can’t do even one cartwheel. She falls onto the mattress.

The fairytale language of The Bugging Watch is by and large missing from Run, which is much more direct and visceral. Just as the former is steeped in fairytale, Run is given a certain removal from reality by Short’s reliance on violent melodrama, which elevates the emotional pitch, but also offers a veil of unreality. But like The Bugging Watch, Run also uses the surreal and grotesque to sharp effect:

“The afternoon La La does not come home from school her mother goes into La La’s stash and eats all of her American cereal….When her husband gets back gone drunk he leans-shut the door behind him. With his body slides to the floor. Keeps sliding underground just as the singed head of his wife emerges from the box of Fruit Loops.”

The characters in Run are generally sketched more sharply (though with the exception of La La, that is not to say roundly) than in The Bugging Watch, particularly La La, who is by turns boastful (“Y’all I would’ve been out of your league at 12. I’m only tattlin’ now, cause I would’ve been 20 today”); fey (“She [La La’s mother] caught the child squinting at her through crib bars and her hair began to fall out”); and deluded (“The only way she can stand it is she convinces herself those soapy fibers sticking in her throat will make her a better singer. She tells herself voice exercises every Tuesday during the typhoon off-season.”), and who is locked in a strange power struggle with Ren:

We are illimitable, he thinks, look at my angel sleep. Incarnate. He tells Bill that nobody not even Pet embodies her essence like La La. She wakes…“Don’t just lay there y’all,” another sneeze, “get me a tissue!”…”I want cereal, Lao Ren.” He will do anything. He pulls on his pants. He begs, “What kind do you want?”

The misery in Run is particularly savage, and it is spread to La La’s greedy and provincial mother and father as well as her feckless captor (“Ren does not know why the little girl won’t be sweet to him not even once but he lives hopefully what else can he do.”). The world in Run is unremittingly bleak for everyone involved:

“She reaches into the house into the bathroom and pulls out a jar of preserves. It has public hairs in it. She giggles. On a patterned shard of Lucite she spoonfeeds the curled sticky hairs to Ren and then smears a dramatic helping onto a square of used toilet tissue and licks.”

The deep reliance on exaggeration and melodrama is such that it can be argued that Run is just as much a psychodrama as The Bugging Watch. But what comes across more strikingly, and what makes Run so successful, is the way Short is able to depict the inner life of La La, and how seamlessly she can work back and forth between the reality of the story and the dreams and desires of La La, as in one of the best poems in the chapbook “Patsy Clone”:

“When I get to America I will have my own room children in America have their own rooms. It will have a lock on the door like when I’m famous and have curled hair….When I get to America pale skin shape of perfume bottle fuzz underpanted pink dots my nipples. When I get to America cowgirl ears pierced sterling silver headphones loud so I don’t listen. Hear that name they read off my tag? I don’t answer to it anymore, when I get to America.”

For all the melodrama in Run, what comes across as most authentic is the fluid movement of La La’s cognition retreating back and forth into daydreams and fantasy. From the shifting tenses (“Hear that name the read off my tag? I don’t answer to it anymore, when I get to America.”), to the adroit use of run-on sentences (“When I get to America pale skin shape of perfume bottle fuzz underpanted pink dots my nipples.”), as well as how content-less sentence fragments can bring comfort to one’s mind (“Please it is so much like hell. I promise. In my new life.”), the disconnection between La La’s daydreams and her reality is ironic, and finally tragic.

“Patsy Clone” also makes explicit something that is implied in the rest of the book, which is the idea of racial passing. There is a tradition in the poems and stories of the immigrant experience that puts an emphasis on realism, with the thought that the immigrant story is underrepresented in the dominant tradition of English-language literature. America abounds in immigrant experiences, but each new wave of ethnicities coming to America has a new variation and emphasis, and it has been the idea that these should be accurate accounts of storytelling. Kim Gek Lin Short has introduced into this lexicon the idea of exaggeration, fantasy, and melodrama, which acts as a different prism in which to view these stories, but is also a demonstration of a restless talent trying to tell a more personal story, which is not always the same thing as a true story. Both The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits and Run are wonderfully original examples of this.

—Reviewed by Dan Magers

Minimum Heroic, Christopher Salerno’s second book, is an exquisitely slim volume of poetry which captures everyday life and transforms it into paintings for the brain. A majority of the poems in this collection seem to fit into the left-margin “conventional” appearance of a poem. So, at first glance, Minimum Heroic may not flash, yet this is exactly where the strength of Salerno’s writing lies. You are seduced by their simple appearance, yet what lies within this volume are tightly crafted miniature worlds where Salerno’s use of enjambment turns the poem into something surprising and complex, such as in “No, Ruin”:

We eat our weight

until excess reveals itself. That part of no

 we don’t understand: wanting to see what we don’t

 want to see.  I think I remember ruin:

nothing green.  Ruin let me discover it when I couldn’t wait:

Salerno breaks the line at “weight” forcing us to wonder whether he means weight as in pounds or if weight becomes symbolic of physic pressure— that inner turmoil we carry within ourselves. Four lines later “weight” has been transformed into “wait.” Minimum Heroic is filled with subtleties like these, where words are forced to bear the weight as end words in a line and then reappear respelled and redefined. Salerno achieves this also with the word “no”. “No” ends the line as a negation or refusal but the next line informs us that to not “understand” is not to know. Through word play Salerno is able to manipulate and create multiple logics resulting in tightly crafted poems which read like open fields of the imagination.

There are many instances where an impatient reader may feel a sense of disorientation and bemusement similar to reading John Ashbery, or to a lesser degree, Joseph Ceravolo.

Salerno constructs his own world within his poems, and the reader must be willing to enter and accept this world. “Other People’s Lives,” begins, “Breathingly, thirty six clouds cross/ the hot field. The sky crawls/ towards lots.” To love this poem, one may need to imagine thirty-six clouds breathing. What do thirty-six clouds look like? How does a sky crawl? This is the magic of Minimum Heroic. These are simple images, clouds, sky, lots, yet Salerno makes them come alive, and we picture them not as ordinary but extraordinary. It’s a lot like a boxer (the book begins with an epigraph from Marvelous Marvin Hagler), we can diagram the footwork, watch the knees and shoulders, and yet the left jab still seems to explode from nowhere. Salerno’s poems are like this. Skilled, well-trained, and full of unexpected explosions. Another example is in “In The Golden Age of Counterfeiting,” which begins, “The beach full of puddles makes the ocean look bigger./ A fish u-turns, wriggles free, or is that/ its final display of emphasis?/” A beach, a puddle, a fish. Yet to imagine the sea in comparison to the puddle’s perspective and to wonder if a fish is attempting to free itself–that is, fighting for life–or a “final emphasis” which is to accept death and in the face of death go out in a final flash of defiance changes the complexion of the poem entirely. The poem continues, “One could search/ the beach in vain for signs of finality:” These signs of finality (or lack thereof) are really the undercurrent of the book.

Throughout Minimum Heroic we get a sense of exhaustion and disappointment in life. Yet life continues, and in the continuation we see the constant colliding of the natural and the man-made world. Salerno’s book appears to occupy the landscapes of North Carolina and New Jersey. In John Gallaher’s blurb he writes that Salerno “finally bring(s) the idea of the heroic back to a South Jersey town…” The idea of New Jersey and how it fits into the poet’s imagination and ambitions made me think of William Carlos Williams’s book Paterson, in which Williams attempts to capture and celebrate a New Jersey city. While Salerno does not necessary work in the same poetic mold as Williams, both books are ambitious in their idea of New Jersey. Whereas Williams attempts to give the reader a direct correspondence to Paterson, Salerno gives us snap-shots like stolen or pilfered images and then carefully constructs a poem around them, so that we are left with a sense of the place as opposed to a knowing of the place. With Williams, it is important for us to hear the people and to feel the bustle yet Salerno’s sense of place is not rooted so much in direct action, instead it relies on intrinsic interpretations and the emotions that are the result of being in New Jersey.

The tradition within Romantic poetry is to leave the urban behind and escape into nature where one has time to think and reflect. What I like about Salerno’s book is he does not choose between the urban and natural. For Salerno the world–constructed, lived, imagined, or dreamt–exists in the tension between the natural world (birds, flowers, insects, trees) and the man-made world (mannequins, glass, bubble wrap, Weehawkin).

The poem “Whirl,” gives us a perfect example of nature and the man-made colliding,

I fall asleep to
the sound of birds bumping glass. I go to bed full
of blackberries and wake as a bride…

Winningly, winter locks itself in a carriage of ice. Outdoors,
zero down. A catalogue trapped in winter branches.

The speaker makes this dance between the constructed and evolved (or created, depending on your philosophy) clear earlier in the poem where he writes,

I am embarrassed,
not for us, but for our building’s inability
to translate from its stoop the letters
I drop from the window chased by metallic bugs
blinking prototypes from the countryside.

	Clean lines hurry wind. All day my window hoards its crust
	of snow. A hawk moth on the Coffee-mate
	folds asleep and out of the cat’s dream.

Minimum Heroic is a book about the world we walk in every day–where nature coexists and survives in the mess of our manufactured things–and the world we construct or deconstruct when we close our eyes.

—Reviewed by Steven Karl

In what begins as something of a poetic daybook and gradually reveals itself as an extended elegy immersed in disappointment and dashed expectations, Gina Myers’s A Model Year blends urban bustle with lyric stillness in poems manifested out of lists and repetition. Somewhere between the New York School of Poetry’s vibrancy of O’Hara or Berrigan and the otherworldly silence of Fanny Howe are whispers of a grinding tedium native to gentrifying neighborhoods:

“last night’s sidewalk		inappropriate proposition	today
new
jeans & thunderstorms	desire		to be somewhere
	away
from rent			demands			& bills

the united states
postal service			losing
the evening clear & windy		no rain	    only children
running				in the halls		music
from a passing			ice cream truck”

This is depression by a thousand cuts. No one phrase here equals a catastrophe. In fact, none do—but the accumulation of them creates a dreary feeling in the pit of the stomach. Myers’s poems come in a variety of lengths and forms (from prose poems, to a long poem of couplets), but the engine of most is more often than not some variation of a list.

Myers has some poems that are literally lists, particularly in her running longer poem “A Partial List of Fears,” which ends three of the four sections:

“Fear of saints or holy things.
Fear of Hegel.
Fear of road travel.
Fear of glass.
Fear of sleep or being hypnotized.”

These poems have the most levity of any in the book. There is something spontaneous to them and unguarded. Two other poems in the collection begin with a quoted line by Robert Creeley and David Shapiro respectively, which she uses to riff off of:

“I see the flames, etc. But do not care, etc.
I watch the sunset, etc. But do not care, etc.
I’ll leave a tip, etc. But skip out on the bill, etc.
I see the spirit, etc. But lost all hope, etc.”

Whereas Creeley’s poem, “The Dishonest Mailmen” opens into a contemplation of addressing emptiness, Myers strikes her note over and over with small variations, which creates a layering effect. These become more than exercises because they continue and extend the emotional landscape of the book.

Lists are usually integrated more deeply into her composition than the above-quoted poems. The way that Myers uses lists is similar to how people utilize them in their daily life. They can be used to keep a running tab of things to do, which Myers exploits to dramatize work-a-day drudgery, and often it becomes mixed with another function of listing—that of trying to get down descriptively the concrete details of a day:

 “The ticket lost is long gone.
I’ve run out of things to sell.
The check bounced.
The phone lost your call
& then I lost your number.
I just put the water on to boil.”

The uncluttered description of these poems sometimes morphs into the intimate recording of a diary, and Myers realizes this. “I don’t know why/ I feel so strongly the need to document this moment, as if I/ don’t write it down, it never happened.” But it’s the very smallness of these moments that makes them important to record, because it is the small moments mostly that make up a life. The structure of the poem is a lot like that of the straight-up lists, but with a variety of content, line by line.

The Creeley and Shapiro poems actually combine lists with a related way in which Myers composes her poems—through repetition, which is like a list, but is more focused on a repeated phrase in a poem (with some variation), even if the repetition is the repeated use of the word “if” at the beginning of sentences. On a formal level, Myers uses repetition as an organizing force; for example, in “The Dare”, the beginning of each of the three stanzas are “The first room is a ghost,” “The second room: a coffin.”, “The third room is a fever.” Myers can focus the imagery of each stanza without worrying about having them transition to the next, and it is the repetition that gives the poem an associative logic that makes it successful.

Aside from organizational concerns, when she uses repetition, it is often more integrated into the engine of the poem, where it might only appear in part, as little as the last two lines to “Perpetual Motion” (“Instruct a wound. / Instruct a wound to heal.”) or as in the first half of “Self-Portrait as a Mirror” where Myers uses the repetitions of “hello,” “little” “you” and “something” in succession:

“Hello empty space, hello
constant shifting—

little disaster, little idea
of home always somewhere
out of reach. You might

think edgier. You might think
this is not the way. Perhaps
something else. Something sharper
or shinier, some undefined other.”

Unlike, say, in her poems riffing off lines from Creeley and Shapiro, Myers is able to move away from the static motion in those poems to something more of the organic structure of an expanded utterance, something more full-bodied. They add to the poems concerned with the quotidian an urgency that raises the stakes. This is particularly pronounced in the third section of A Model Year. The imagery becomes more generalized, and the poems have the force of litany in the beginning of “The Answer”:

“You’d think more—

You’d think never enough, never enough.
You’d think somewhere else. But no,

these words have nothing more to offer.
You’d think no, no. You’d think naughty girl.

You’d think for Christ’s sake.”

In the opening of Section III, the poem “Forecast” displays a use of repetition that comes from that great example of repetition, The Old Testament:

“The sea will flood & flood. Years spent wandering.
Ten years of rain will be followed by ten years of drought.
One year of decadence will be followed by one year of plague.
Our bellies will be full & then the will be empty.”

While this sense of religiosity or mysticism becomes more pronounced in Section III, it is also present in the rest of the poems throughout (including the long title poem that makes up Section IV). There is absolutely nothing to suggest from any of the poems that Myers is turning to this kind of language as a source of salvation, or a pointing towards an answer. Rather Myers understands the poignancy and cultural and historical weight behind this kind of religious language, and she deploys it for her true concern of A Model Year, which is elegy:

“The wounded in winter

take all the books from the shelves. They whisper there was
a body, it wanted to live. The wounded in winter picture
an empty house & burning letters. (Always this burning
for the wounded in winter.)

The wounded in winter count backwards, peel back
the floorboards. Absently they turn
page after page in search of prayer.”

Myers gets a great deal of impact from this use of repetition and the language of litany, and her poetry is deeply reliant on lists and repetition. This is the underpinning of the book’s strongest poetry. The best poems in the book have the weight of litany and sense of religiosity, but it is when she uses them with the intimacy of letters that it works the best, taking the force of elegy from the heavenly and putting it into the life-sized disappointments, saying hello

“The memory of summer unapologetic.
After my mother died, you wrote the nicest letter
& I never wrote you back.”

or goodbye

“The imagined lives of forties on rooftops
& fingernails flecked with silver
spray paint. As if a photograph could catch
it all or catch anything at all…
The frenzied youth smashing
up against one another. Now: counter-
clockwise. Goodbye lovers & haters.
Goodbye New York.”

—Reviewed by Dan Magers

The hilarious, staccato blasts of contempt and pain that are Dan Hoy’s poems gradually bring to mind the Dennis Cooper poem “Elliott Smith at 14″, quoted in part here:

I hug my friends until
we're bruised. I won't
quit hugging them,
not if they scream
at me to stop. Every-

thing's a machine.
Snort it. Everyone's
a ride. I won't stop
riding us until the barf
backs up in my throat.

Everyone's fantastic
every second. Suddenly
one of us is torn apart
by a machine, but I'm too
real to care. Fuck you.

Cooper, in his mid-fifties, is canny enough to position this rant into the articulate inarticulateness of a teen fuckup destined for greatness. This makes “Fuck you” acceptable. While the tone of Hoy’s poems are similar, there is no suggestion that the poems come from anyone besides the persona of a totally jaded adult staring down mediocrity. This at once makes Hoy’s persona less endearing, less vulnerable, and the poems themselves more vulnerable (to criticism). “I spent a whole season once without / a drop of water and so did the dirt / I slept with” does not play so well in more high-minded circles.

The almost vampiric malice of the poems are little-guarded by pyrotechnic wordplay or syntax manipulation. Poems launch, punch your gut, and peace out. “I Won’t Stop Ever” in its entirety:

What I want is
tucked away in the small of your back
like a tapeworm. I'd give my firstborn
for a tool calibrated to waste
no energy and no measurable amount of time. The needle
will sedate them first, if you're scared.
My life saves lives.

The poems’ simple declarative sentences sometimes get extra torque with a combination of creative enjambment and seeming non sequitur that either clips a sentence before we expect:

I make out with oracles or
what's the point.

or extends its scope further:

I teach the kids with shit for brains
and the illest aracana mundi in the world.

Speaking of aracana mundi, Glory Hole displays a strange fascination with spirituality and mysticism couched in poems generally concerned with work and play: “Tetragrammatron”, “Mediums”, are tossed out there; a poem is called “I Can Feel My Brain Already in the Christ Grid”; and once the speaker remarks: “O resplendent Angel Gabriel, I’m sure it was / technically the opposite of black magick / but come on.” What is this gesturing to? When exactly does posturing gets confused with sincerity? “I feed on plasma and cry a lot / and suck at feelings.”

Glory Hole is like the emotional version of Irving Kristol’s definition of neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” The poetry is like a wound that grew a nasty scar which inspires a combination of fear, awe, and disgust. Going into its motivations feels futile and is actively discouraged: “History is for kids. Tomorrow / is full of horror, stupidity and death.”

While Glory Hole’s jadedness has a take-on-all-comers jitteriness, The Hot Tub languidly moves through time and space. The time and space of Jon Leon’s poems is much more specific than Hoy’s (read Los Angeles). Like Ellis, the speaker describes excess and indulgence matter-of-factly, as if none of it is a big deal. “I dunk my waist into a hot tub at Sundance. Some babes arrive in white bikinis with Ketel One. They are like snowflakes in tangerine boots eating Doritos.”

The Hot Tub’s untitled opening poem sets the stage, and is actually at an emotional pitch above the sequence that follows it. While the rest of the poems are narrated by the protagonist in a clinical, novelistic fashion, the opening poem is directed at a specific, unnamed person in a voice that is gushing, intimate, druggy, and hyper-sincere, “I’m so glad you’re here. I love you. I was listening to The Barclay Hour. It’s the only thing that makes me feel good. I wrote this vignette for you. I need you to listen to me and make me feel good and party with me…At the museum I was looking at The Abduction of Europa. All I could think about was how real it is to be alive…Listening to the songs that make my life rule and thinking about how much fun it was.”

The poems move like compressed scenes from Less Than Zero, and it is easy to forget that this is apparently supposed to be contemporary, replete with Facebook, mp3s, American Apparel, and Cory Kennedy eating a slice. Leon encourages this confusion with continuous 80s references to Michael Kors, “99 Luftballons”, Time-Life cassettes. Leon even writes scenes with things that are downright anachronistic, such as when the speaker calls his broker from “a wall of payphones.”

The broker says “the open market is drowning,” but in the context our current economic waste land, the mixture of cheesy excess and eighties iconography gradually exposes the ridiculousness of virtually everything the speaker says, does, and feels. This sense of the ridiculousness is what separates The Hot Tub from the deadpan tone of Ellis. This might suggest that The Hot Tub is mere materialistic critique or satire, but there is more to it than that. “Sike, I’m at home, my life is a warzone, wondering where the people are.”

Another anachronism is telling. After typical Hot Tub activity (”I pinch my crotch as a limo rolls past.”), the speaker describes how, “I go into a vacant building that’s empty, pop some batteries into my Walkman, and dance myself to tears.” Why is the speaker fooling with a Walkman? Nostalgia, certainly. Earlier in the poem (”California”) he says “In my head, I’m rolling back the years.” The Hot Tub is the work of nostalgia for certain kinds of aspirations that the poet rationally knows 1). cannot happen and 2). are dumb. It is like when David Thomson, describing The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant says it “still has no equal in its simultaneous delight in ’style’ while pouring acid over the image.”  To put it another way, The Hot Tub is emotional kitsch somewhere between Nicki Rose and Yacht Rock.

Hoy and Leon both embody this reaching for emotion without pretending they are not doing so, and in so doing, sometimes say exactly what they mean, and both chapbooks are Awesome because of that. In some quarters this strategy of irony may be scorn-worthy, but this slick veneer is maybe not so much more removed than an earnestness veiled behind a wall of water and tree metaphors. Somehow it may even be more vulnerable. That is not to say that Hoy and Leon cannot or should not strive for less posturing to articulate feelings and ideas. Both seem to have such an ability. Or else they can just go irony forevz.

—Reviewed by Dan Magers

Myung Mi Kim writes in Penury “the place I’m from is no longer on any map.” Place—both as a geographical and emotional landscape—is a primary conceit in Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s brilliant second book, Underground National. One of the more intriguing factors about Lee’s poetry is the way she conflates images and language to thrust the reader into a space of indeterminacies. We are confronted with the mathematics of bodies being (mis)governed, as well as the inability to attach concrete definitions to both people and situations. As Lee’s words struggle, search, prod, and probe, we are forced to decipher what it means to be human and all the codifications that come with existing in a world filled with violence, greed, and damaging political ideologies.

A cross kite. My link to the sky, pinned up into wafting blueness
there. Grafted together, folded like a paper coat, a hidden oath like a
never worn, golden ring. Wait—I thought this was the beginning of
my skin. “[T]hat may be an indication of what lies ahead.” (”Korea, What is”)

A kite is an ornamental object held by a human hand yet soaring to heights unreachable in our bodies. Lee interweaves the location of the sky with those of the ground, ” * Chemical production sites. / + Biological weapons sites. / – Uranium enrichment sites. / would they fight if there were an unforeseen rebellion?” The next canto further explicates the kite imagery:

Kite: between two impossible states. A tug and pull enforced by sky’s
restless dreaming, contrary wakefulness of earth, nerve-like. Flicker
feeling in the flesh, cast free but held. (”Korea, What is”)

Once Assata Shakur was safely out of the United States and exiled in Cuba someone asked her how it felt to be free and she replied, “Freedom! You askin’ me about freedom. Askin’ me about freedom? I’ll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn’t than about what it is…” Lee works within the same dialectic, “cast free but held.” Much of Lee’s poems examine the states of inbetweeness— this desire to be free but the inevitability to define or redefine an identity either in or against the structure of power’s eyes.

In Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks he writes, “”To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” Underground National is occupied with searchers bearing the weight of civilization and culture. As with Lee’s previous collection, That Gorgeous Feeling, the poet once again examines pop culture as a partial representation of the citizens’ pulse. Lee writes about the death of Korean Boy Band member, Lee Seo Hyun, “And the celebrity suicides continue in 2008. M Street’s member Lee Seo Hyun (30), was discovered hanging from his neck, on 12/1 at 4:30pm KST…” (”Korea, What is”). Lee expertly mixes in snippets of reports, “the suicide capital of Asia, is moving to ban search engines from excepting search queries such as, ’suicide,’ ’suicide methods,’ ‘group suicide, and other terms pertaining to” (Korea, What is”). What happens when language is banned and a national identity is affixed?

In the book’s second poem (the book consist of six long poems), “Underground National (a priori” Lee writes:

	Isn't that the home we tend
	garden of spilt teeth
	the wordy dialects we send underground?

	And by dialect, to indicate that very thing
	both home and foreign
	what marks you safe but also alien—

	All porous confines confound, perhaps.
	A ray of light. A sting.

Much of the tension throughout this collection of poems is the realization of how being marked one thing “female,” “male,” “Asian,” “military” can bring comfort from within the confines of those that also have the same words affixed to them, but how these same words can cause alienation from those that do not fit into these definitions or those that apply these identity constructs as blanket stereotypes. “THE BENEFIT OF HAVING A HUMAN BODY,” examines the complexity of pinning a place or definition, or destination such as there, “When we talk about going there, it is with the tacit acknowledgement/ that ‘there’ is not a space. By going ‘there’ we mean a psychological location…”. Then the following poem continues, “If I suppose ‘there’ as another word for night, or what the sun can’t touch, or the things that are occluded to us in a variety of periodizations and unruly circumstances…” In these poems the landscapes exist, the geographic locations can be marked on a map, but these poems explore what the effects are when this place, for better or worse, becomes a part of you and you become a part of its identity and culture. One must then go to an internal place, a place that cannot be mapped. One must psychologically sort out the manifestations of the physical.

Underground National is a fierce exploration into nations, identification and the need to maintain a sense of humanity in the face of an ever-shifting and often destructive world.

You would say it is grounded in the sun. I pin it up to flight. What
light makes visible, but currents transport elsewhere buried under
rock. Are these divergences so different. I am not writing about a
release. The body stabilizes as a form of brightness, heat. The
quantities arising as fingers and eyelashes are held for a breath,
drawn deeply.

As though history conquers—in some instances, it evades or slips
past. The origins of a national boundary—a stain.

— Reviewed by Steven Karl

Philadelphia. For poets CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock, it is both a geographic location and a state of being. The City Real & Imagined finds two of Philly’s finest strolling around the city, exchanging poems of inspiration and desperation. Conrad writes, “when will I/vanish at/ all my/ want/ dear/ impatient/ city I/ Love? / SHERLOCK: (reading graffiti) What’s NFG? / Me: New Found Glory!” Conrad professes his love for a city that is impatient. What does Conrad mean by impatient? Is he referring to the impatience of the police that decided to firebomb MOVE members* back in 1985 or the impatience of activists as Mumia Abu-Jamal** remains on death row? Or is it a city impatient with growth and expansion? The tension of the poor becoming poorer while the rich become more elite and prominent in a city whose identity has always been that of underdogs (think Rocky) and blue-collars. For Conrad, New Found Glory doesn’t mean a rock band from Florida; it symbolizes his eternal optimism and hope for the direction this city is to take.

The City Real & Imagined confronts politics and religion head-on:

	my friend
	says she'd
	rather see
	state-imposed
	atheism than
	state-imposed
	theism but I'd
	rather see
	the state
	disappear

It is as if Conrad’s friend is stuck thinking in an Althusserian mode, yet Conrad immediately discards of all state apparatus and instead suggest the disappearance of the “state.” The poet asks, “can’t we/ imagine our/ hands on/ one another/ instead? Question/ our extent/ of warmth/ LOVE was/ a tomb for/ awhile/ between borders.” Anyone familiar with Conrad’s poetry will realize that “love” is perhaps fittingly a major theme in a book about the city of “brotherly love,” yet the tension mounts when people have the inability or refuse to gravitate towards love:

	NO TRESPASSING!
	Robert Indiana
	LOVE Park
	Barricaded
	No bongos today
	Skateboarders peer
	through fence
	quietly skate
		 Off

	ASSHOLE IN SUIT: (laughs)
	Guess they closed your
	LOOOOOOVE  Park huh?"

	ME: (sitting on police
	barricade) IT'S YOUR
	PARK TOO ASSHOLE!

Love Park throughout Philly’s mired history has been a consistent battle between skaters and musicians and the police. So the question remains, why not shake off the shackles of class distinctions?

Conrad’s poems are often thin, tight, and concrete, whereas, Sherlock’s fan about the page and often capture the “imagined” Philadelphia:

	This is pure hell or the punk

                        rock origins

                                                   of a city       Another

                                                                       day in the life of

                        a spider

Sherlock seamlessly incorporates images of spiders to coffin-risers which works as an effective quilt of both imaginary and real such as the section below where his camera-eye captures Philadelphia nightlife:

                                                      Out of

                                                             the coffin & into 

                                                                          the nightlife

                                                              faux robotic

figures blink

             the future dance floor

                                                                    \baby blue\

                                                    Weirdly elegant

“Weirdly elegant,” could be the best description for Sherlock’s poetry. Few poets use and manipulate white space better than him. “Weirdly elegant” also works to describe the interplay between Sherlock & Conrad. Either poet will use a word like “tomb” or “deviance” then the other picks up riffing off of the same word which reminds me of the city’s history of jazz and my grandmother telling me stories of Coltrane standing on bar ledges perched above the audience and trading horn salutes with some of Philadelphia’s local horn blowers. And whether the poets are capturing a city real or the image of the city and/or life which exists in their heads, as they manage to capture the pulse and breath of Philadelphia— this book is, in fact, a tribute to the fact that the underdogs do come out on top and that one way to harness Benjamin Franklin’s electricity is to read The City Real & Imagined.

* MOVE was a Philadelphia-based organization founded by John Africa. The organization mostly consisted of African-Americans and preached a back-to-nature lifestyle. They were primarily against technology, which caused serious confrontations between the members and the city, especially in their refusal to take their sick children to hospitals. The city responded to their perceived inhumanness, with a dose of inhumanity by firebombing an entire block where Move members lived. I got out of school early that day.

** Mumia Abu-Jamal is a journalist from Philadelphia who has been in prison since 1981 and on death row since 1983 for allegedly shooting Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner.

—Reviewed by Steven Karl

Even when Liner Notes was first published in journals, it was a step apart from most of the poetry it shared pages with. Indeed, another poet mentioned to me that she used excerpts as readings for students in a non-fiction writing class. But, at just under eleven-thousand words, it at first seems too short to be published as a stand-alone memoir. It is not deeply-researched or focused enough to be folded into the 33¹/₃ series published by Continuum Books. I am going to go ahead and call it poetry, if only for the selfish reason that I do not want something so good to be ceded to another literary genre.

Liner Notes comprises about one-hundred-and-seventy five interrelated prose poems (or paragraphs if you like) that oscillate between clinical descriptions of rock-and-roll suicides and deaths:

On February 8, 1990, Del Shannon shot himself with a .22 caliber pistol. A year later, Shannon’s wife filed a law suit against Eli Lilly & Co., the makers of Prozac, claiming the drug contributed to his suicide

and descriptions of the poet’s life and observations, both past and present

Procession of Mission hipsters pedaling their track bikes into oblivion. They look half-dead and dynamite, pressed through pre-dawn dust. Each day is a mistake that you are tying around my neck.

Initially, this looks like a public/private dichotomy, but that would be a little too easy. Most, if not all, the musicians and entertainers in Liner Notes form a superstructural history of the poet’s life, if not in the strictly chronological way that Rick Moody does in his story “Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set”, but in a way that deeply associates personal memory with music:

In junior high a girl I had a crush on told me about a song that actually made you feel like you were on heroin when you listened to it—not that I knew anything about what heroin felt like. That evening I asked my father if he knew the name of this song, and he said, “Oh, ‘Heroin’ is okay, but you should really listen to ‘Sister Ray’.

Liner Notes’s prose is mostly unadorned and straightforward description about the author’s life and these factual descriptions of musician deaths, the latter of which is suggestive of David Markson. One can gain enjoyment and a sense of the whole through excerpts, but the emotional impact of the work reveals itself only when read in its entirety, as sections take on a gradually escalating tension, which again makes it different from a lot of poetry. I have no problem calling this poetry, but these descriptions might suggest to some that Liner Notes might be better recognized as lyric essay. Mister himself seems to think he is writing poetry (”I’ve decided to stop hating the prose poem and give in to its charm, like a girl you just want to fuck so bad but don’t want to talk to.”).

The flow of personal memories coupled with the litany of musician deaths (entertainers like Ray Combs and the actor who played Auntie Em from The Wizard of Oz make appearances too) builds momentum while, at the same time, Mister tightens his focus on personal subjects. This simplicity of structure is matched by an emotional forthrightness. “I’ve been so depressed lately. I’ve never read that line in poem.” The “I” of the poem is not obscured in any writerly fashion, and no mask or persona is constructed; there seems no reason not to equate the “I” of the poem with the poet himself.

Drugs are pervasive throughout. A description of Nick Drake’s overdose takes on resonance when coupled with the poet’s drug and alcohol use:

Every time I stand up, I get lightheaded and stumble. On my birthday I drink a vodka tonic and get so dizzy I can’t stand. Later that night I drink a beer and feel fine. I’m relieved that I can start drinking again.

The descriptions of drug use, boredom, and loneliness give the work an emotionally scraped-out tone that only grows sadder when detailing the speaker’s relationship with his father:

Once he found a picture of Ronee Blakley—a still from Nashville—in the garbage and gave it to me. Sometimes when I look at that picture, I wonder, what has he ever given me? Something he found in the trash. The picture’s framed, he repainted it.

If this sounds depressing, that’s because it is. Indeed at times the atmosphere can get oppressive, even angsty. Mister is more than aware of this:

I was at a party and this guy kept interrupting himself, saying, ‘But me, me, me, it’s all about me, anyway…’ in an ironic, self-deprecating way. But he said it many times to different people so all night he really was talking only about himself.

Indeed, for all the forthrightness, Mister wrestles with the amount of disclosure throughout the book. “I could never write a memoir,” he writes at the outset, and then later, “We don’t want writers to tell us about their lives, we want them to show us something about our own. Maybe that’s why I’m ashamed to tell you about my life.” This conflict is coupled with a pervasive sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction with the speaker’s own life. A third and more implied component arises from this—the mixture of fascination, aspiration, and fear the poet generates in detailing these episodes of suicide and death by entertainers, often directly or indirectly a result of drinking or drugs. This makes the stakes of Liner Notes high, and this sense only intensifies as the work comes to a climax that was building from page one.

“I never knew you could lie in a poem. Then I realized you couldn’t,” Mister writes. Because the poet believes this seriously and deeply, the sense of “putting down on the page” escapes pure reportage. For writers, occasionally, a storehouse of interests, fascinations, and desires builds up over the years, maybe meant to be doled out separately, and suddenly ripens to a point where everything spills out in a form that is both simple and mixed with a deceiving depth of emotion. Liner Notes feels like such a work, and it invites being read in one sitting. Excerpts do not do it justice, and hopefully the entire thing will find its way somehow into the hands of readers.

—Reviewed by Dan Magers

One of the best things about Matthew Rohrer’s new chapbook is it is funny. It is funny in a way that is not “in your face”. Here are some funny lines, which may or may not be funny out of context:

1.) “Thank you Jim now I’m / too high to meet your sister.”

2.) “Don all I did / was see some shit / happen I wish I hadn’t / and then got on a night bus / which didn’t even charge me / and let me off way up here / and now I’m walking to a cave”

3.) “My horoscope says I’m fat”

They All Seemed Asleep is also politically relevant. If things were to get really bad in an isolated part of America where the government has no influence, say Western Pennsylvania, and the people start to have a civil war, it would be like this chapbook. People would have to die for their beliefs and stupid people with guns would probably take control. Here are some lines that may or may not be political out of context:

1.) “No one reads the newspaper”

2.) “The opposition was in power / and their progressive / legislation was too much / for, you know, the usual / characters priests, big fat cops / old ladies / busybodies”

3.) “Thank you Jim now I’m / too high to meet your sister.

If this chapbook were a movie, it would be like Diehard; not the second Diehard or the third or the fourth one, which kind of sucked. It would be more like the first Diehard, which was “before its time” and managed to be politically prescient and relevant without sacrificing any of its badassness. If Matthew Rohrer’s chapbook were a novel it would be For Whom the Bell Tolls, but it would not be as long, and it would have less Spanish people. I wrote on my blog that it would be like Farewell to Arms, but that was wrong. Completely wrong. If I were going to name this type of poetry I would call it Diehardism, because it is like a movie or a piece of literature that implicitly states it would still be awesome if it were a movie. I hope Diehardism catches on and Hollywood starts buying up poems. If it does, you heard it here first.

All these farm boys ya wanta se somethin slick
Girls turn your hips like a joystick
Gotta do the round house but don’t move it too quick
Ya wanta impress a hick
Then make it go tick tick tick tick tick

The narrator believes an agrarian social structure and an emphasis on promiscuity and fornication are both desirable values. The simile “turn your hips like a joystick,” reinforces the previous statement by comparing a woman’s body to a tool used for entertainment purposes. Notice that the line does not read, “turn your hips like a pen writing your innermost feelings,” or “turn your hips like a woman who enjoys monogamy.” In these lines there is a clear effort to establish a matrix of values. Now here are some lines from a Tao Lin poem called “room night”:

i held the cruelty free soap to my arm
and moved my arm in various directions
a kind of meat eating liberal
was making me move my body
that was the day i argued against publicly owned companies
on my blog (…)

These lines also attempt to define a system of values. The narrator’s use of “cruelty free soap,” is a reaction to or against “a kind of meat eating liberal”. Nuanced political contradictions between “meat eating” and “liberal” have caused the narrator to feel dirty in both a figurative and literal sense. In order to rid himself of this dirty feeling, he must apply the “cruelty free soap”. The following lines, “that was the day i argued against publicly owned companies / on my blog (…)” puts the narrator’s values in opposition to traditional capitalistic business structures. In these lines there is a clear effort to establish a system of values in favor of hygiene, a primarily vegan or vegetarian diet and probably communism.

Despite the apparent similarities between Jessica Simpson and Tao Lin, there are also nuanced differences between the two artists. Jessica Simpson’s values, which can be characterized as “sexy populism,” are appropriate to her simple verse / chorus / verse / chorus structure, and the wide-ranging appeal of her sexy subject matter. Ostensibly, Jessica Simpson’s aesthetic choices support her beliefs that provincial living and making it go “tick tick tick” are both desirable sociopolitical values. Tao Lin’s values in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which can be characterized as “unsexy individualism,” are similarly reinforced by a set of aesthetic choices. Many of the poems in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy do not have titles. Those poems with titles have long, unwieldy ones or terse self-evident ones. Many poems recycle their lines from other poems in the collection. The tone of most of the poems can be characterized as a flat affect. These choices cohere into an aesthetic argument that the subject matter of the poems is very unsexy and probably will not appeal to most of the people living in Ohio or frequent readers of publications such as Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan and/or Teen People.

By comparing Tao Lin and Jessica Simpson, it should be clear that sexy populism is a more successful, and therefore lucrative, system of values than unsexy individualism. This is evident in the perceived incomes of both Tao Lin (who lives in a multiple tenant apartment in Brooklyn, New York) and Jessica Simpson (who dates Tony Romo of the Dallas Cowboys). If Tao Lin would like to sell more books, he should try to be more of a sexy populist. He could do this by appealing to people in rural farming communities and or people who enjoy frequent ephemeral social interactions and popular forms media. One suggestion would be to create a monthly periodical called Tao!. Much like Oprah Winfrey’s well-known publication O, Tao! could feature various articles about Tao Lin’s beliefs, favorite books, and dietary and hygiene habits. Other possible names for Tao Lin’s publications: All About Tao, Tao Now, and Tao of Tao. If Tao Lin were to do this, people who don’t like his writing would like his writing and he would be rich.