Publisher's Synopsis
"People will lie about what they've read when it's something you've written." - Isaac Simpson
Some of the lies I'd tell about reading this book would include the phrases "Good job," "You have a real talent for poetry," and "I would like to read more!"
This collection reminds me of sixth grade, where I composed a poem that rhymed "suicide" and "cyanide." My teacher scrawled "very descriptive imagery" in a green pen at the bottom of my preteen doggerel, which is sixth grade English instructor terminology for "hacky teenage angst." If I were to blurb this book, it would also read "Very descriptive imagery!"
Much like pimply suburban boys scribbling sad tales, Isaac Simpson is also obsessed with people taking in and expelling bodily fluids. I estimate 80% of his poetry references somebody pissing, puking, or producing semen. One poem is about rich people using the urine of the homeless as a perfume, which I assume is a metaphor for the working class affectations of the bourgeoisie. To read Isaac Simpson is to know what it smells like near a bus stop.
Other mysterious fluids are evoked, such as when Isaac writes of "j****** off into the toilet, missing, wiping off strings of yellow half-Jewish j***." Why is it yellow? Is the idea that instead of producing something necessary like semen, he's just spurting out gross pus? Later on there's "This water tastes like a rusty subway bar, /my self sits on the edge of its couch." What the f*$& does this mean? Why would water taste like a subway bar? What the f&$# is a "subway bar?" Does he mean a subway pole? Subway poles are gross but not particularly rusty. Subways smell like piss! It's as though an alien came to Earth and tried to pass off its rudimentary but incorrect understanding of Earth potables in the form of sub-Bukowski banalities.
I don't think I bothered to read anything by Tim Barnett, he of the ASCII art poems. Perhaps this is unfair to ASCII art, at least those elaborate designs have a purpose to their form. The proportion of time spent designing the layout of the writing versus the writing itself seems far too out of balance to be worth investigating further. Oh well!
As for the work of Spencer Gauthier, it is telling that he is credited under Spencer M de Gauthier-StGermain. Using your name like a Grow Monster that gets fancier the longer it sits in the water is such an obvious sign of insecurity that if it appeared in a work of fiction it would be criticized for being too heavy-handed. At the conclusion of this paragraph, I assume whatever-his-name-is will have developed another hyphenate.
Returning to my initial analogy of teenage boys writing dreck, the childish rhyming schemes and continual topic drift is reminiscent of high school English class poetry units, where bitter, failed novelists attempt to inspire their charges by instructing them to compose their own poems, but said students, being teenagers, instead produce such offal as:
"Sikhs have beards And so did Ernest Hemingway But mine is a Yid's Which is of course the best there is
With the availability of any cuisine Life here is an incredible dream I have my pick of many types of hand cream."
Was that written by a fifteen year old struggling to meet a word count requirement, or a grown man writing something for this book? Which answer is more upsetting?
Circling back to Isaac Simpson, the composition most evocative of the collective effort expressed here is from "Mellors," a tribute, of sorts, to going on a desert campout with your friends to do peyote, a basic-ass activity Simpson has dressed up in what I'm sure he thinks is gritty language and metaphor. Wasn't there an episode of The Sopranos that already covered this ten years ago?
If there is a constant in which these authors can take solace, it is that there is always an audience for such affected cool guy onanism. Maybe this audience is you!
