Nagin is pissed at everyone

4 Short Reviews

  1. “This Love is Office Lighting” by Ani Smith is a skein of seamed prose poems. (You can yawp/yak them micro-fictions if you want—I’d rather lick a cocked fist than enter that argument rightly now.) This chapbook is yellow of hue, the yellow of grappling car sparkle or admitted regret or light, fingernail brail on inner thigh. It is obsessive. It is a crawl, a bite, a love arachnoid of outrageous size, each leg a bristly possibility, from “stab my mother in the eye with a silver rattle” love to pluck love to alien planets love to “violently maim” love to “my pussy hair is a field of dewy flowers” (hey now) love to eyelash love to “dribble starlight” to “plot to blot” love. (That’s 8 legs, pay attention now.) Interview here of author:
  2. Sports radio. Sports radio as a human being. Who knows? You are basically eating Cracker Barrel, with a chaser of bottled tap water, or Time. The words are plastic, white orbs. Shake your head at mistakes whiles you make mistakes. Crest strip the jock itch. What I would have done in that situation!…possibly the stupidest thought in a person’s gray mass/dimpling ass/twitter gas. You know the smell. Ha! Ha! I agree! (Cue sports-reporter laugh and story about wife-at-home/kids/time you met an aging shortstop at a steak house.) But, hey, you’re not causing immediate harm either. For a short auto drive, let the mind go snapped towel or jowl, falling earfuls of nothing.
  3. I like this guy’s jacket, notch and lapel.
  4. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by David Brinkley. Who the fuck reviews a 736 pp. book in this format? That’s stupid. That’s inconsiderate and reductive. Well, me. Most “authorities” fucked up every way possible (or just ran away). Most “outlaws” did very well. In this way: Do something. Or this rarest of qualities: When the shit goes down, be a Decent Human Being. Many stark images, many sad facts. An accumulation. Prose exhaustive, sometimes clinical. That’s fine. Actually the way to write about Katrina. We don’t need bells and whistles. We need the gurney, abandoned, one wheel spinning, the body missing, as in gone.
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November 17th, 2011 / 9:28 am