Presenting engagements (including reviews) of poetry books & projects. Some issues also offer Featured Poets, a "The Critic Writes Poems" series, and/or Feature Articles.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

BOOKS by JENNIFER L. KNOX and MEG JOHNSON

JIM MCCRARY Engages

The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway by Jennifer L. Knox
(Bloof Books, 2010)

and

Inappropriate Sleepover by Meg Johnson
(The National Poetry Review Press, 2015)


The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway by Jennifer L. Knox.  Bloof Books. 2010.  79 pgs. 

If you do not think or believe that this book is the funniest and most dangerous book published since Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger you do not know squat about poetry in the US of A.   Ka Boom.

from "Red/Green Color Blind Madness":

Whoa there, Stretch.  Hands
off—the madness stays right
where i left it, Pokey warned,
holding a purple gun on me.
See it's a philosophy, really—
a conscious choice to be this way—
though it's costed me dearly...

It's rabies, you dolt—you're
drooling all over the place,
I said, feeling the spider's egg
buried in the hump on my head
jump.  Soon it would hatch
and its scorching righteousness
would pour forth like lava.

**

Inappropriate Sleepover by Meg Johnson.  TheNational Poetry Review Press. 2014.  68 pgs. 

This here is what a ‘first book of poems’ should look, feel, taste, sound and smell like.  It is all in this book.  If you read one thing, make it the one called: "My Ex-Boyfriend Mitch (Performed as Variations)."  When you are finished you will give up.  That is all we can do.  Thank you Meg Johnson.

from “My Ex-Boyfriend Mitch”:

Variation That's Czech!


My ex-boyfriend Mitch had to borrow my tools
I yelled at him for not having any of his own.
               My ex-boyfriend Mitch got drunk
on Manhattans.
                         Then he told me he didn't

like my hair in a bun.


*****

jim mccrary till lives in Lawrence, Ks.  Recent poems in House Organ and Truck.  Having a Beer with Emily D was intrudoced in a limited edition as was Folio 2015, a "write through" of some Shakespeare poems.  New collection due from Theenk later this year.  Other recent publications include Not Not, Es Verdad, Mental Text and Po Doom.  Here he is (left) in a fur vest, late 1960s, a loft in the Bowery, New York City:







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