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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Wed, 06 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: Universal Monsters by Bryan Dietrich
Bryan Dietrich's Universal Monsters is one of the most unusual books I have read in a long time. Ransacking popular culture for images of monsters, Dietrich assembles them into an inventive pastiche that touches on the monstrosities in our own lives--our experiences, our culture, our fears, our pleasures.
Here's one poem that provides the flavor of Dietrich's achievement:
Dementia
"You can't kill the Boogeyman."
-from Halloween
You meet a woman, a worker of words
who loves O'Connor and Hitchcock's Birds,
all horror stories, the better for worse.
She's blonde and Wiccan, a comely curse.
Zombie, chainsaw, fetus, hook,
athame, candle, bell, book.
Her spell is modern, her interests, yours.
She knows of triffids and cepheids and spoors.
She, too, once sat in the glow of the screen
while the monsters processed and summer grew green.
Alien egg sac, mouthful of brains,
priest on the sidewalk, count the stains.
She takes you first by neck by eye,
then takes you again with the gorgeous lie
of language spun from the life she's not
lived so much as faced and fought.
Tooth, claw, razor, bone,
Halloween, Twilight Zone.
The monsters she has staked and boxed,
buried out by the hollyhocks,
outnumber yours by kith and kind.
Hulk, brute.... Malign design.
Rosemary's Baby, Eraserhead,
Race With the Devil, Dawn of the Dead.
You want her to know that you understand,
that sometimes the thing in the dark, The Hand,
is still attached to a heart that speaks.
The first date comes. You rent her Freaks.
Stalker, slaughter, barker, blight.
We live and love in black and white.
Universal Monsters is a truly ambitious book; it is, literally, fearless in the face of monsters.