Junk Poetry III By: Rolland "Moose" Amos JUNK POETRY I'm just your average junk poet. My poems will clearly show it. Such poetry may look like junk, That's below most standards sunk, That coarse, crude stuff contains, Yet poetry-like in form remains, With no fixed themes, reason or rhyme, Just whatever came to mind. Still, Junk Poetry, to be sure, Has merit, as does manure. Its poems in their clever way, Convey ideas we wish to say, That some may even pause to read, That normally they'd no way heed. But junk poetry is fluffy stuff, You read it once and that's enough!
An NPR Best Book of the Year From 2018 Whiting Award winner Tommy Pico, Junk is a book-length break-up poem that explores the experience of loss and erasure, both personal and cultural. The third book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space “Junk,” in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of “being” for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?
A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
A master of documentary poetry, Erika Meitner takes up the question of desire and intimacy in her latest collection of poems. In her previous five collections of poetry, Erika Meitner has established herself as one of America's most incisive observers, cherished for her remarkable ability to temper catastrophe with tenderness. In her newest collection Useful Junk, Meitner considers what it means to be a sexual being in a world that sees women as invisible--as mothers, customers, passengers, worshippers, wives. These poems render our changing bodies as real and alive, shaped by the sense memories of long-lost lovers and the still thrilling touch of a spouse after years of parenthood, affirming that we are made of every intimate moment we have ever had. Letter poems to a younger poet interspersed throughout the collection question desire itself and how new technologies--Uber, sexting, Instagram--are reframing self-image and shifting the ratios of risk and reward in erotic encounters. With dauntless vulnerability, Meitner travels a world of strip malls, supermarkets, and subway platforms, remaining porous and open to the world, always returning to the intimacies rooted deep within the self as a shout against the dying earth. Boldly affirming that pleasure is a vital form of knowledge, Useful Junk reminds us that our selves are made real and beautiful by our embodied experiences and that our desire is what keeps us alive.
A Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry A New York Times Notable Book of the Year From the Winner of the Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and finalist for a Lambda, Tommy Pico's Feed is the final book in the Teebs Cycle. Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.
The “Garbage Eater” of the title poem in Brett Foster’s provocative collection is a member of a religious sect (some would say cult) in the Bay Area who lives an ascetic life eating scraps from dumpsters. Just as this simple way of life exists within the most technologically advanced region in the world, Foster’s poems are likewise animated by the constant tension between material reality and an unabashed yearning for transcendence. The titles of Foster’s poems—“Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde,” “Meditation in an Olive Garden,” “Little Flowers of Dan Quisenberry” —nod to the poems of the classical, medieval, and Renaissance masters he studies as a scholar. In Foster’s vivid imagination, however, they point to the surprises hidden in the quotidian: a trip to the DMV, a visit to a chain restaurant, and the saintly reflections of the Kansas City Royals’ best closer. A lesser, more faddish writer would then tend toward ironic distance, but Foster fearlessly raises such unfashionable subjects as joy, doubt, gratitude, and grief without losing a sly sense of humor, even (as the sample poem shows) about poetry itself. Given its ambition, The Garbage Eater hardly seems a debut work. Foster’s universal subject matter and approachable style will win fans among both the most experienced poetry readers and those easily intimidated by contemporary verse.
“Nye at her engaging, insightful best.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Acclaimed poet and Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye shines a spotlight on the things we cast away, from plastic water bottles to those less fortunate, in this collection of more than eighty original and never-before-published poems. A deeply moving, sometimes funny, and always provocative poetry collection for all ages. “How much have you thrown away in your lifetime already? Do you ever think about it? Where does this plethora of leavings come from? How long does it take you, even one little you, to fill the can by your desk?” ?Naomi Shihab Nye National Book Award Finalist, Young People’s Poet Laureate, and devoted trash-picker-upper Naomi Shihab Nye explores these questions and more in this original collection of poetry that features more than eighty new poems. “I couldn’t save the world, but I could pick up trash,” she says in her introduction to this stunning volume. With poems about food wrappers, lost mittens, plastic straws, refugee children, trashy talk, the environment, connection, community, responsibility to the planet, politics, immigration, time, junk mail, trash collectors, garbage trucks, all that we carry and all that we discard, this is a rich, engaging, moving, and sometimes humorous collection for readers ages twelve to adult. Includes ideas for writing, recycling, and reclaiming, and an index.
Junk Poetry IV By: Rolland “Moose” Amos JUNK POETRY I’m just your average junk poet! My poems will clearly show it! Such poetry may look like junk, That’s well below most standards sunk, That earthy, tasteless stuff contains, But, poetry –like form retains. Has no fixed themes, reason, or rhyme, Simply whatever came to mind. Still, Junk Poetry, to be sure, Contains merit – as does manure. Junk poems in their clever way, Convey ideas we wish to say, That some may even pause to read, That normally, they’d no way heed. But Junk Poetry’s fluffy stuff, You read it once and that’s enough!
Junk Poetry By: Rolland “Moose” Amos I’m just your average junk poet! My poems will clearly show it! Such poetry looks, sounds like junk, That’s below standards sunk! That crass, crude stuff, contains, Yet poetry-like in form remains. No fixed themes, reason, rhyme, Just whatever came to mind. But junk poetry, to be sure, Has merit, as does manure. Yet, poems in their clever way, Convey ideas we wish to say, That some may even pause to read, That normally, they’d no way heed. But junk poetry is fluffy stuff, You read it once and that’s enough!
