Schtick
Coval (L-Vis Lives, 2011), a Chicago poet and founder of the youth poetry festival, Louder Than a Bomb, gains fluidity and depth with each collection. In his fourth book, this line-crosser and bridge-builder—of suburb to city, white to black to Jewish, literature to hip-hop—wrestles with his Jewish American identity in rambunctious, irreverent, and staccato rants, raps, and laments. Coval veers into memoir in trenchant and rueful prose poems about his youth and family. Gliding between the personal and the communal, the sacred and the profane, the painful and the absurd, Coval muses over the fate of European Jews filtering through Ellis Island, losing names and shedding identities, and the treacheries of assimilation. He offers clever, hilarious, and melancholy odes to Jewish holidays and Jewish comedians, lashing protests against both anti-Semitism and the plight of Palestinians, and such barbed riffs as this snap from “how jewish boys get irish names”: “cuz america is afraid of what it can’t / pronounce.” Propulsive, provocative, shrewd, sorrowful, tender, and soul-baring, this is a watershed collection for Coval and his readers. --Donna Seaman