THE DEPUTATION OF FOLLY

by William Frank ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 2025

Frank offers a grisly poetry collection about human mishaps.

The poet explores tragedy and absurdity through graphic and darkly humorous vignettes. Each poem is a self-contained story of misfortune in which characters suffer the consequences of their actions or simply experience bad luck. Frank sets the stage with “The Lilies of the Field,” a poem set in an office in a sketchy part of a town called Heaven where bureaucrats at the Deputation Office of Human Follies manage humanity’s “foibles, flops, fantods and Fate.” In “Tony Island, Professional Cuddler,” the title character—whose advanced techniques include “the Hong Kong Noodle” and “the Flying Anus”—takes umbrage with a negative online review accusing him of strangulation. A 48-year-old divorcée, Carol Venison, has a graphic paragliding mishap in “Nude on a Crane,” “killing, among others, a Gliding Survivors Support Group.” Similarly, a man is hit by a self-driving car and dragged through a clothing store, where his “cock was torn off,” in “The Numinous Future of Autonomous Delights,” and another man inadvertently destroys a produce department after being shot out of a waterslide, over the highway, and into a grocery store in “Tragōidía at Orcus Bottoms Efficiency Apartments.” The book concludes with “Ballade of an Agelast,” a meditation on the meaninglessness of life by a speaker planning to observe another of the town’s regular executions.

For the most part, Frank effectively uses dark humor to trigger existential dread in these unique and unsettling poems. At their best, they include wildly creative and subtly satirical scenarios, such as an unpopular scientist getting mauled by his co-workers’ pets on his lunch break in “Bring Your Pet to Work Day” at a nuclear reactor, accidentally triggering a catastrophic meltdown (“The Happy Rainbow Nuclear Disaster”). The poet grimly captures human hypocrisy in lines such as “When something terrible happens to someone you love or you, / it’s a tragedy. But in Human Nature’s exuberant derangement, / when it happens to someone else, it’s entertainment” (“Dr. Ingie Potts, Professor of Human Nature”). That said, the poems are unapologetically crude, and include frequent mentions of blood, vomit, flatulence, ejaculation, and excrement. The mishap accounts are unabashedly vulgar, as in “The Death of the Longevity Expert,” in which an “Oompah Band” in a mall tramples a man’s testicles before “his legs and part of his ass were flung / into the screaming nubiles of Forever 21.” The collection’s unrelentingly dark and cynical tone, in lines such as “Heaven and Hell are against us, and we contend / with the slavery of our personal stupidity” (“Bale and Beauty By All Human Lights”), will wear on readers. However, Frank also shows that he’s clearly capable of more than shock value; some characters are beautifully detailed, affecting creations, such as a man who lives a “quiet, faraway life alone / with my goldfish, hummels and slide trombone / and a small library with a long bookcase // shelved with puzzles rather than books.”

A violent and gruesome poetry collection with occasional, brief moments of vulnerability.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025

ISBN: 9798987782453

Page Count: 62

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | GENERAL FICTION