Logorrhea: Poems
"You don't grow older, you grow better," they say. Several of these poems complain about "the timely demise of King Louis, / the northern Nevada fuck machine." "God, what / a lard ass I've become," Louis sighs, while of the woman he loves, he acknowledges, "you cannot talk--little light / breaks in your eyes when I visit." Yet he can dance for her, and she smiles. He can fit old stories with new barbs. As he tells "The Scorpion and the Frog," the frog's been stung so often that he's immune to justonemore--unfortunately. In "Jesus Finds His Ghost Shirt," Jesus notices that Mary has gone AWOL along the Via Dolorosa, retreats to the car, rummages in the backseat, and finds another means of resurrection. Louis can ponder defiance and failure, desire and incapacity. He can sound more than ever like his poetic peer, Charles Bukowski. But unlike -Bukowski, he can speak, as a self-described half-breed Indian, out of a genuine community, however shattered, which makes him not better, perhaps, but more serious.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.