COURTING REJECTION

A lengthy collection of rhyming poems written over a span of 40 years.

This massive book is divided into eight sections. In the first, “Sonnets’ Prisoners,” Deemer discusses such diverse topics as the resurgence of swastikas, and a lap dance. In the poem “Denn Bleiben ist Nirgends,” he contemplates the generational divide between older men like himself and younger ones at a bar. The second section, “Boy-Katt and Dawg-Grrl,” kicks off with a poem about the speaker’s need for “a kind hand’s good petting” and turns into a catalog of various sexual acts before chastising people who dislike sex. The “Quiet Times (QTz) and Countrified Nonhaiku” section explores faith through short sermons, prayers, and parables. In the next section, “Countrified Haiku,” the poet tries his hand at the titular Japanese poetry form. “SS: Sauna Songs” zeroes in on aging and its effect on romantic prospects. The author translates poems by the likes of C.D. Balmont and Francisco de Quevedo in “Other Tongues: Translations and….” Works of remembrance and meditations on death comprise the next part, and the book concludes with “ZpZm,” a section that comprises a lament on the ephemerality of people, love, peace, and nature. Deemer impressively manages to explore a wide array of topics throughout this collection, incorporating themes of politics, desire, spirituality, mortality, and the act of writing itself. However, this breadth of topics is this book’s sole strength. Often, the poet employs crude sexual descriptions, such as “its muscled ass flexed, / building up love’s fart.” Other poems feature cultural insensitivity, such as “One Indian Summer Day Without a Care” in which the speaker declares: “Everything Indian was so much neater.” The excessive rhyming quickly becomes cloying, and the poems themselves are mostly rootless, taking place in unspecified times and nebulous places with scant details. As such, this collection in unlikely to hold many readers’ attention for its length of more than 600 pages.

An overlong compilation that focuses too heavily on rhyme schemes and not enough on substance.