Soul On Standby

These poems draw on memory and its occasional fictions: some restate the obvious and the observed in surreal captions, others recast the lyric as documentary. There is tenderness here and anxiety, alienation and the all-too-familiar, tongue-in-cheek cynicism and self-parody. You’ll find couples that sag in the same places, a retro 50s look at a Saturday morning family, a letter written to fields of grain back home, poetry that claims to reduce cholesterol by 14%. As one poem states, there’s “all kinds of weather in a poem.”

The absurd and the commonplace co-exist here, both delivered in a casual, idiosyncratic voice. But it’s the narrative thrust that vitalizes the language and imagery of these worlds where a sentence can be used to define as much as distort experience. Soul on Standby challenges how we think about poetry, fusing the lyric and the impulse for storytelling in a snapshot of the plain and simple. It engages the reader in a dialogue that explores what the portrait artist, Lucian Freud, meant when he said, “What can be more surreal than a nose between two eyes?”