Best Reads of 2008: Poetry

Contemporary Poetry Delights

Hairspray: precipitating. Cotton balls:/ snowing. Crotch: showing for the removal// of hair. Lips of scarlet & cheeks of pink,/ he'd think her a cadaver at the hands// of a mortician, except she chats with/ the beautician in fractured Portuguese.// If he squints his ears, he can almost/ understand."

~Holy Land by Rauan Klassnik

published by Black Ocean, 2008-avilable via www.BlackOcean.org

Black Ocean is a press that has published some enthralling and entertaining surreality-laced tomes over the last few years, often mixing a genuinely entertaining accessibility with a more abstract, imagistic dream/nightmare tone. Klassnik's collection consists of short, prose poem style vignettes that often offer the lingering impression of snapshot combined with lush dreamscape. Lust and violence co-exist; love and war intermingle; sometimes the imagery is almost akin to reality TV sound bites combined with sensationalized news coverage, as filtered through a poet's pen, waveringly powerful and poised on the brinks of moments and scenes that document beauty & ugliness, awe & horror, and human & cultural detritus enshrined like little monuments erected in the midst of the chaos. Some of the juxtapositions are disconcerting borderline shocking, even in a time in which media the inundation of violent imagery sometimes seems to leave us feeling desensitized and numb. Klassnik's images still cuts through all the TV snow and white noise.

"The whole way through--as they bleed it, skin it, burn it, slice off its head, tail and hooves--it's galloping down through you in a darkening shower of tiny white flowers.'

~Cadaver Dogs by Rebecca Loudon

published by No Tell Books, 2008-available via www.notellbooks.org