Ready to want to buy a book?

Read the poem on the back of Gordon Massman’s The Essential Numbers: 1991-2008, just out from Tarpaulin Sky Press:

Yeah.

I’ve been reading this for a couple weeks now, a few poems at a time, because it is so brutally right there and fucked and ready to fuck your head, it needs the slow imbibe, the good one. Where so much ‘poetry’ can be yadda, these are words saying something hard and loud, and meaning it.

Sampled from 18 years of Massman’s writing, poems all numbered for titles, all to the teeth.

I.e. here is the first full sentence of 1262:

Dear God: thank you for the physical beauty in the world, etc.
and get fucked.

How about these lines from 1316:

…Karen’s tampax, Sheila’s lub-
rication, the exquisite blood orange and yellow pipefish, the
unexpurgated yank through caverns of emptiness, cravings of
Joyce, weird tectonic schisms in the earthplates of stability; my
superinformed assailant confusing me with identification; smash-
ing my dick between fist with jackhammer-aching arm, he hal-
lucinatorily grunted, “fucker, you are me,” then incomprehen-
sibly vaporized the instant my come blew me off its string; pride
terrorizes—I’ve slaved, I confess, for years, homosexually, pain-
fully, grievingly, plumbing swallowing my esteem; the tidal sucks
off a devastation-home. No more: hazel; six feet; gray wreath-
tonsure; straight teeth; cupcake mole, left shoulder; moustache;
olive; one-ninety; deceptively soft spoken; black bush; left lobe
crease; fiftyish; big fingers.

It appears there is more than one Gordon telling it sexually, violently, flagrantly like it is than just the Lish.

These are some unyielding monoliths of spit and tongue.

I think you’ve been given all you need now to go pick this up immediately, though I’ll certainly be sharing more about it very soon, and more sample poems are available on the TSky page.

This is the kind of book you can’t ask for until you have it.

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