There is another risk in this method. In an ideal world their masochism leaves them as unviable as the abolition of beaches. Glibness leads easily to condescension. Here even the blow-driers are morally ambiguous. Enjoying a good lunch on a fine day becomes sinister, which must be a surprise to most readers and certainly to other poets.
Any suburb is a sparse dark place of unreason.
Residents of such suburbs have, obviously, suspect breath and are masochists, and are probably implicated in moves to abolish or close public beaches. The latter is a startlingly lateral proposition to say the least. It is on that last contemptuous word that Kelen's occasional gift for an interesting phrase founders. His cartoon-collage method is a potentially useful net but it has rather large holes in it which too often let logic, irony, tolerance, compassion, empathy, slip through. It is a disdainfully clever net which rarely catches pain, or doubt, anxiety, the tug of loyalty, or indeed a single urgent belief or moment.