Jan 02

Review by Alan Catlin: Under Normal Conditions by Karl Koweski

review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024

Reading Koweski’s latest collection is like a heavyweight fight with life, language, and poetry. In fact, one of my favorite poems in the collections evokes the image of “the lifeless eyes of sonny liston.” The former champion who lost his crown to then Cassius Clay, soon to be Mohammed Ali, after a phantom knockout punch. Many in the sports world thought Sonny took a dive, which stands to reason given his associates and tragic end to drug abuse. Koweski doesn’t pull any punches or take a fall. Watching his four-year-old play Grand Theft Auto is one of the most chilling poems I have read in quite some time. The boy relishes death and destruction and Koweski concludes, “my little psychopath.”

His “High life of the low life” is a hoot featuring a guy who claims he can recognize a porn actress by her coos and gasps.( which is totally absurd as those are often dubbed in by an off- camera voice ) He cites Nina Hartley as a blonde who I always thought had dark hair but you don’t watch those movies wondering about whether the star’s hairs is bottle blonde or not. The low life would snort at the idea of even noticing the actresses hair, no doubt. Koweski’s contention that poetry readings are a kind of spoken word masochism is inspired but it is “We are all fools here” that sums up the small press poet’s life as a writer,

“the poet can retire
a legend,
a small press mainstay,
an underground hero.

never really dying,
only fading
into greater obscurity.”

Welcome to the club fellow poets.

—Alan Catlin, author of Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged and many others

Jan 01

Review by Alan Catlin: A Room Above a Convenience Store by William Taylor Jr.

review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024

William Taylor, A Room Above a Convenience Store, Roadside Press, available from www.magicaljeep.com 2023, 88 pages, $15

Taylor’s latest collection spans the pandemic years and a time of personal health crisis involving serious heart surgery. Perhaps, the most effective ones involve people he meets during his recovery after the surgery. These pieces are both surreal, oddly funny, and totally believable. Taylor sees a young woman, a pretty girl as he says, reading a big volume of poems on the train he is commuting to work on. He wistfully thinks of how alive the poets words are even now and that maybe someday he might be worthy of that kind of audience. Mostly what Taylor is, is a keen observer of modern life. San Francisco is microcosm of the country filled with tourists who look at stuff but don’t see anything, who don’t understand are the barbarians at the gate ordering complicated drinks at the bar they don’t give tips for after they get them. His wandering through the Tenderloin at 3AM yields an evocative picture of how even the lives of low lives, miscreants, petty thieves and the homeless have changed over the years. A man is riffling a parking meter that only takes credit cards, for coins, says it all.—Alan Catlin, author of Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged and many others

Dec 31

Review by Alan Catlin: Street Corner Spirits by Westley Heine

review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024

Westley Heine, Street Corner Spirits: poems and flash fiction, Roadside Press, available from www.magicaljeep.com or your favorite online retailer, 2023, 146 pages, $15

Street Corner Spirits is the second Roadside Press publication for Heine following his novel about trying to make his way as a street musician in Chicago, Busking Blues. While Heine claims not to be a poet, there are some great moments of pure poetic fire as Heine here. He can turn a phrase and rip off amazing lines with ease. From AA meetings where he talks of pouring booze in his inner child, to his time on the street, he represents what he calls the “missing chromosome generation.” My favorite of these is “Sugar Skull” which resounds with the breathless authority of Howl on acid,

“She was sure she could
lead the homeless army
over the wall of the
Hollywood Forever Cemetery
to dig up the Pharaoh
and use his skull
like a radio to free
the internet slaves.”
(from “Sugar Skull”)

There are four distinct sections of Street Corner Spirits, which could be summed up as follows,
1-Youth
2-Somewhere between teenaged and adult
3-Mature and more settled
4-As we live now in a Brave New World. I have seen the future and it is Apocalypse Now!

There is a great deal of raw energy in the first two sections as Heine throws words on a page and seeks a voice to channel all the memories of bad choices made and lived with. As he settles into a less peripatetic, more focused life, marries, and moves on with a sense of direction, he finds a new sense of personal peace. Heine expresses his vision of the society as a festering boil about to explode by writing songs, performing, and painting. The energy that went into living the life that is expounded upon in the poems is often chaotic and so are the poems which vary in effectiveness from knock your socks off amazing to nice try, better luck next time. His work as a poet feels like a work in progress but this collection clearly shows he is well on his way to getting there.

It should be noted that there are a few brief prose stories included that parallel the poetic work. While they feel almost incidental compared with the energetic poetry, the rent party, “Keep Your Shirt On” has a manic quality that suggests partying with Pynchon and the bright young things. I am on board also with his idea of a “Pay Per View Apocalypse.” Live streaming the heat death of the universe seems like the coming thing.

—Alan Catlin, author of Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged

Dec 31

Review by Alan Catlin: Born on Good Friday by Nathan Graziano


Nathan Graziano, Born on Good Friday, Roadside Press, available at www.magicaljeep.com 2023, 80 pages, $15

I was reading the recent anthology from Nerve Cowboy: Selected Works 1996-2004 ( a best of the early years of long running print poetry zine) that featured four poems of Graziano’s from that era, reminding me how long I had been reading work by this poet. Besides feeling old, the realization, re-enforced by the tone of his new collection, is that Graziano is now middle aged, settled and maybe not “still crazy after all these years” but still alive (as the peasant says in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “I’m not dead yet.”) Which probably says a lot about me as well as an officially, much older than Graziano, well settled poet.

The Nerve Cowboy poems are signature Graziano poems that were the hallmark of his early work: lots of lost nights and down days after, the kind of Carveresque dissipation and hooking up that made his novel, not long out of print ( yes, I still have my copy) Frostbite, memorable. Some of the poems in Born on Good Friday reflect a looking back ruefully and wondering, “Why the hell did I do these things to myself. And how did I survive.” Been there and done that. Throughout his many collections of writing, Graziano has maintained a tone of engaged in this life style but not taking myself all that seriously. He always seems to successfully strive for, and find, the humor in the most outrageous and ridiculous things that he does. The key point is he knows they are ridiculous while so many adult children don’t.

Born on Good Friday is roughly chronological beginning with his upbringing in a traditional American Catholic family proceeding to a rejection of his upbringing and later antics of a young and not so young, adult. Like many of us who lived through an engagement with Sister Harridan of the Tricornered ruler with the wrath of God on her side, much of the education and indoctrination didn’t take root except to reject the tenets brought up in the faith. I guess I was reminded of the old cliché last told to me by a very Irish Colleen, “You can take the catholic out the church but you can’t take the church out of the catholic.” Proving her point, The same young lady was married in a church and she hoped, maybe even prayed fervently, that we would all survive the service without being struck by lightning from above given her wanton ways as a young adult. We did.

Graziano seems to prove his point that mellowing does not necessarily mean giving up or sinking into a near comatose middle age in front of a TV with packs of Marlboro Lights and cans of Budweiser mindlessly watching what passes for a sporting event on 24/7 sports TV. Not that he doesn’t like sports, he is a fervent Red Sox fan, but there are other things in life. Other things like loving his wife and children, writing clean well narrative poems, some recalling his crazy days and lonesome nights, and more contemporary ones; still rueful after all these years.

—Alan Catlin, author of Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged

review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024

Dec 20

Review by J. Nishida: And Blackberries Grew Wild by Susan Ward Mickelberry

Susan Ward Mickelberry’s poetry presents a “microcosm of body”—an intimacy of sensory experience found in whippoorwills and windows, fish bones and raspberries, mosquitos and moss, blood and thorns, a standard sink, a red tricycle. But this intimacy of detail, along with gentle rhythms of Mickelberry’s narrative voice, cannot distract from the sheer breadth of content carried in the poetry.  Reading her poems is like stepping into gentle waves of one of the beaches she writes about—the crispness of the water and sand and other minute sensations is vividly alive within the context of the vastness of the ocean itself. This collection moves from Apopka to Asmara, Muskogee to the Bahamas, the Ozark hills to Azores, exploring themes of “Everything”—love, sex, fragility, loss, abuse, revelation, consciousness, voice. And Blackberries Grew Wild offers us the unpretentious but rich and evocative life experiences of a deeply honest, thoughtful poet.
—J. Nishida, Poetry Editor of Bacopa Literary Review 2024

Dec 18

Review by Michael Hollywood: Street Corner Spirits by Westley Heine

One gloomy spring afternoon at the age of 13 I was feeling bored and restless, sitting at home roiling in adolescent malcontent, when I happened to pick up my brother’s copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island Of The Mind.

I was instantly transfixed by the playfulness and whimsy combined with hard bitten cynicism. Here was something that spoke directly to my reality. Not some flowery rhyming bullshit designed to soothe aching hearts, but something more like the punk rock that was starting to impinge on the fringes of my awareness. This was some freaking TRUTH!

Suddenly, poetry and literature went from something old dead people did to something I could and (more importantly) would want to do. It led to some other discoveries, and soon I was hip to an entire segment of counterculture that had previously evaded me.

I get that same vibe from my friend Westley Heine’s recent poetry volume, Street Corner Spirits. It’s been taking me a long time to get through it; partly because I’m savoring the poems inside like tasty razor-infused bon bons, partly because every third one or so just blows me away to the point I have to lay the book down and contemplate it for a week or two.

Wes comes out swinging against the hypocrisy of American Society and the vicissitudes of life with gusto, but also has the courage to point his razor sharp perceptiveness at his own faults and shortcomings; making for some intense episodes of what 12 Step Programs call a “Relentless Moral Inventory.” Serious art that’s also wryly amusing and entertaining as hell.

Someday, somewhere; some angry scared kid shall come across a copy of Westley’s book on an angst-laden afternoon and be stunned and transformed by it the same way that Ferlinghetti led me down the rabbit hole into counter-culture in its purest form.

If you know any talented but malcontent teens (or malcontent adults for that matter) in need of inspiration, you would be doing them a huge favor by giving them a copy of Street Corner Spirits.

—Michael Hollywood

Dec 10

Review by E. Lynn Alexander: They Said I Wasn’t College Material by Scot Young

“They Said I Wasn’t College Material by Scot Young is a collection that spans time and circumstances, by a poet willing to resurrect the sting of assumptions and expectations to turn the lens in the other direction. He challenges social gatekeeping, and the classist label culture that nurtures the privileged and pushes the rest of us toward their service. He understands what feeds self doubt and steers destiny away from us, and he goes after the source.

His poems celebrate the capacity to experience and feel honestly, when that is often suppressed: “when young boys cried/wiped tears before dads could see.” These poems convey love, nostalgia, hope, fear, anxiety, and more in connection with identity in a body of work that speaks to peeling back those expectations. Authenticity and humility draw people to connect with his poetry, and this is what he is after: “I only strive/to put one word in front of the other/ and hold it there long enough/ for it to matter/ to somebody.” It matters to us, for sure.

Young knows that crushing aspiration and potential crushes people, particularly at times when we have every right to see a future that is ours to shape. For those of us lucky to know Scot Young, we know that this is his cause- to remind us all of that most fundamental right. He shares what he has learned about the breakers and the broken, and he rejects the perpetuation of that power. Besides, there is dignity in choosing our own damage: “even bluebirds/ that are set free/ fly into windows.”

This is not the same as holding up the glass.”

—E. Lynn Alexander, Co-Founder and editor of Collapse Press

 

Reserve your SIGNED copy at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/college/154

Oct 20

Local author Dan Denton chronicles blue collar living in new novel


BY JASON WEBBER/THE BLADE

Dan Denton does not imbibe alcohol.

Seated at a table in The Attic, Denton, sips Red Bull and cranberry juice, a far cry from the beer swilling protagonist of his new novel The Dead and the Desperate, which was just published by local imprint Roadside Press.

On Saturday at 2:30 p.m., Denton will give a reading from The Dead and the Desperate and be interviewed by Professor Kathe Devault of Ohio Northern University at Gathering Volumes, 196 E South Boundary St. in Perrysburg.

At 45, Denton has lived a life of great highs and crushing lows… READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE BLADE https://www.toledoblade.com/a-e/culture/2023/10/20/local-author-dan-denton-chronicles-blue-collar-living-in-new-novel/stories/20231020006

Oct 17

Review by David Alec Knight: The Dead and the Desperate by Dan Denton

If you have liked Dan Denton’s poetry, or if you liked his first novel, you know what you’re in for. And guess what? There’s even more now: he has grown much as a writer since, and this novel is even more important.

You might think, as you begin to read Dan Denton’s THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE, that it’s going to be some blend of Charles Bukowski’s WOMEN and POST OFFICE, just set in a factory, and if so, you would be wrong — stick with it: he has his own voice and it asserts itself more and more as you read. Fans of such novels of Bukowski will find much to like here, sure, but there’s not much more of a Bukowski influence really than on any other American indie / small press novelist writing for, and of, the working-class, the middle-class, the blue-collar, the bottom classes, the backbone of the real America.

Denton’s writing is honest, raw, unfiltered — it’s an authentic voice, much like a documentary before it’s cut down to an 80-90 minute run-time so theaters can show the maximum number of showings per evening for maximizing their profits. There’s nothing on the cutting room floor here, so to speak. There is nothing that Denton leaves out in the depiction of his main character’s life — the drug addictions, alcoholism, the aimlessness, mental health struggles, a humor prone to ill timed sarcasm, and the sincere but hindered idealism.

He is honest with himself, and knows what he is, and what he could be. But this is far from a trauma dump: this character knows what has caused his life to be what it is. He knows what he has done to make it this way. And he is well aware of what others have done to make his life as it is, and the lives of his co-workers, and his blue collar brethren and sistren across America — it’s those powers who were, and those in power now, perpetuating a cold opportunistic machine that has been woven into the fabric of his nation.

He is aware of his place in the Machiavellian and Malthusian manipulations in the decades that preceded him, and the long half-life of Reaganomics. And equally aware of the falsity of the wars against alcohol and drugs, and in that the warring on marginalized peoples, and ‘bottom’ classes to do so, all while labyrinthine corporate institutions have been treating generations of workers so harshly no one can function for long without some kind of self-medication — ‘mother’s little helper’, soft drugs, hard drugs, alcohol, gambling, religion as opiate, whatever it takes to keep their cog turning in the machinations of the machine.

One of the strongest and most important exploration’s in Denton’s story is how the dehumanizing nature of the only work he feels suited for, in turn affects the worker when he gets home. Work directly affects home life and relationships more than anything else he’s dealing with (or not dealing with).

An unexpected pregnancy leads to an attempt to create a relationship with no real foundation, and a marriage with a lot going against it only weeks in. He does the things he feels he has to, and work as hard as he may, they always seem to be weeks behind the bills. He has mental health issues and addictions, and there are many interesting characters around him that feed into his addictive nature, because of course they have people in their lives that do same. Oppressive economic and social factors play their part too. Trips to a used bookstore provide a reprieve from a lot that goes wrong.

While his character isn’t in the best state to be in a relationship, what with addictions and mental health issues, and a marriage that neither he nor his wife were really ready for, Denton’s story very clearly shows how there are many negative external forces that come to bear on relationships. Dehumanizing work makes for dehumanized workers. Denton’s character knows this in his heart and mind and struggles to fight it on both fronts. Others around him fight it too, but many don’t. His in-laws seem to have bought into it and want him to sell his soul to it and be a good boy.

His is a life that many live, and is rarely represented, never made into made for-TV movies of the week back in the day, and never likely to be made into a reality show now, and rarely a docu-series. An entire class of people actively struggle day in day out, without their everyday reality known. Well, Denton’s book is part of that much needed reality check. And everybody deserves to know. Everybody needs a voice and THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE is a part of that which gives voice.

Dan Denton’s THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE could well do for factory work what Upton Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE did for the meat industry. If people read the book they will wake up. If they wake up they have the opportunity to do something. THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE presents harsh truths that should not and can not be ignored. Changes can be made with enough will. We have to ask ourselves if we want to live, or to merely exist.

David Alec Knight is the author of Leper Mosh (Cajun Mutt Press)

Oct 10

Review by Westley Heine: The Dead and the Desperate by Dan Denton

The Beats and later Charles Bukoswki cleared the way for the working class poet, the outlaw writer, and the mental outsider to enter literature. After Buk died in 1994 no one has really replaced his mantle. In the vacuum has swelled a generation of writers who seem to think if they get drunk and write about pussy they are following the tradition. They are wrong. They are missing the point. Dan Denton may be one of the only novelists and poets out there today who can legitimately claim to be a 21rst Century Bukowski, but one with a political consciousness and a more enlightened understanding of the battle of the sexes. Some may say his never explicitly naming using his baby-mamma throughout his new novel is cold, referring to her as “My pregnant girlfriend” etc, but I would argue he is dutifully protecting her anonymity. On the flip side he doesn’t shield himself at all, but exposes himself to the light without wearing protection. He shares the truth. He shares the needle. He writes from the frontlines. He writes from factories, dive bars, cheap housing, the opioid epidemic, from Midwestern places where right-wing values and union concerns are purposely pitted against each other. It’s a lonely thing to be both streetwise and an intellectual in America. But we are less lonely with Mr. Denton. It begs the question: What are people afraid of? The truth?

Unlike others influenced by the gritty realism of Bukowski or the Beats, Dan knows when writing a good story it’s all about dynamics. A tender little voice for 400 hundred pages doesn’t mean much. A tough guy voice for 400 pages doesn’t mean a damn thing. But when a tough voice pauses, breaks down, and suddenly opens up now you know you are hearing the real deal. It’s like a Humprey Bogart film when he goes from “I stick my neck out for nobody” to doing the right thing at the end. It’s like Lou Reed singing “Heroin” and then suddenly hitting you with “Pale Blue Eyes.” We’re all complicated. We all have both sides. Dan Denton understands the meaning of Bukowski’s “Blue Bird.” The drama lies in first describing your mental armor, and only then cracking it open and letting the world see the light inside. The factory workers, the immigrants, the gay kids trapped in small minded towns, the prostitutes molested as children, from those clinging to religious values desperately to make sense of the world or to those hopelessly clinging to drugs to keep going… I know these characters. Perhaps Dan has gotten to know them more intimately. When one of the characters, Joe, a father who just lost his little girl to cancer, turns to the needle for salvation we don’t judge him. In fact, we understand. Yes Buk, it’s the information age. How can one help but be more and more empathetic? We can all hope our hearts will continue to bloom wide as history cascades forward. Congratulations Dan, you’re leading the picket line.