Praise for The Death of the Poem and Other Paragraphs

“The Death of the Poem is one of the most entertaining, witty, surprising books I’ve read in years. It’s also, in the best possible way, very weird. But these poems aren’t merely winkingly surreal, but are filled with anxiety, insight, and rage, pointing always toward very real human passions and difficulties.” —Kevin Prufer

“A consumer devours himself, a junk-food addict eats from garbage cans, a titmouse lives in a woman’s bra: there is a demented literal-mindedness to these funny, fast-paced prose poems that turns the world inside out and reveals every smidgen of its goofy, delicious splendor.” —David Kirby

Sample poems

You Can Have the Jam

After months of a rigorous bombing campaign and night and morning hand-to-foot combat, it seems wiser, finally, to attempt some sort of compromise with the cockroaches. Look, I say to the one who appears to be their leader, We’re both reasonable organisms and I believe we have a mutual interest called survival. I’m willing to share the apartment if you and your folks agree to keep to the crumbs and climb back into the woodwork prior to my turning on of the light. Why don’t you put down the baseball bat, he says. In the periphery, the others scutter this way and that, forming a shifty circle around me. I will, I say, as soon as you put down that bag of chips and get your feet off the table. He leans back, rests his carapace against the back of the sofa and lets his feelers hang limp on either side of his head. He twirls his hairy legs, occasionally dipping a delicate foot into a jar of jam and then sucking it clean. Do you realize how many lives you’ve squished over time? he asks. Well, what might you do, I plead, if you witnessed another species walking off with a bag of your groceries? I feel a couple of stiff legs wedge themselves under my arms and a couple more grab my ankles as I’m hoisted horizontal and aloft. My squirming and writhing is useless. Dozens of hairy black legs pin down my chest, pressing my back flat against the top of a small marching band. You can have the jam, I shout at the leader. Please just tell them to put me down! Oh, they will, he says. I twist my neck to see where I’m being taken: toward a window being raised by one who’s reared up on his back legs.

Can Poultry Matter?

There was a time in this country when grandpa would have poultry hour after dinner. We would all gather round and listen to poultry. People kept rows of poultry on shelves now fowled by television. You could discuss poultry with folks in coffee shops and it wasn’t this down-and-out elitism-people were just naturally riled up about poultry. I’d often hail my hep comrades on the street by crowing, “Hey you fabulous bastards, have you heard the new poultry?” I think it all started going to feed shortly after Mr. Strand revealed that he’d been eating poultry. I saw him romping in what was the end of those and the beginning of these, these shriveled, dark days for poultry. You know it’s had its head turned, neck snapped, when it’s being sold like religion. They have poultry camps where you can pay to concentrate. Some people slam poultry and if that’s not geekinese then it’s the university where they get degrees in poultry and never stop squawking about it. I woke up one day at a poultry convention when someone said, “Can poultry matter?” I said, “I don’t know, can cornbread? And just where in the hell did I put my drink?” It’s sad. It’s as if the routine has come home to roost.