66 GALAXIE

by m Ioncar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 1998

This prizewinning first volume, selected by Garrett Hence, embraces its own rudeness: an admitted ""narcissistic 90's beatnik,"" loncar avoids capital letters and favors no conventional punctuation. His jump-cutting style hops from image to image, creating a collage of incidents and things drawn from a hyped-up world of ""post modern tv scrap culture."" Breathless allusions to road movies punctuate free-flowing narratives about a boy, a girl, and a car: in an America of""evangelists and mass murderers and movie stars,"" they hurtle from motel to motel, coffee-fueled, sleepless, and grateful for jukeboxes full of Patsy Cline. At times boozy and bluesy, loncar's short-short poems risk glibness, when they're not pared down to incoherence. The road narrative culminates in a tragic crash, and sexy Angelina (a soft-porn Garbo) dies--the whole event re-created typographically (and unclearly) in ""postscript: landscape with car crash."" ""Wallace P. Hipslit, age nine"" nicely changes pace with a portrait of a young boy on a swing trying to impress a girl--the poem neatly re-creating the boy's rhythmic motions. But loncar's aesthetic better shows itself in the longish ""the king of refrigerator poems,"" full of all sorts of posturings and boasts: he's a ""poetic hard ass,"" with ""a willingness to fuck with any/margin foolish enough to come within yards/of me."" Though he imagines himself a threat to the ""fascist neo-/formalist"" poets, loncar undercuts his own poetic and political conceits with much inspired self-effacement--but even that develops into another tiresome pose.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1998

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Middlebury/Univ. Press of New England

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998

Categories: FICTION