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Have Fun Pretending by Alex Hampshire

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  Have Fun Pretending is made up of 120 untitled poems, each very tightly justified to the left margin and vertically centered. Though they have line breaks, they read more like a nonstop droll of speech whose effect is accretive and reverberant, at times sounding a bit like Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation : Do good things with bad money do bad things without money. Become a bad person for free without money, as things become free for everyone who acts now. All free things become bad things. All things become bad, too, because whether a bad person or a good one. No one is free while others are obsessed. No one is without the possibility of becoming capable. Lines like these and “nothing ever happens where no one ever profits / except when authorities are aware of the circumstances” speak to Hampshire’s antipathy towards mass-produced political discourse, his sense that good deeds have always already been bought by bad money and repurposed as virtuous marketing schemes. Indeed, much ...
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From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson by Zack Darsee & Elise Houcek

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On the first page of From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson , the “speaker” (Flangan) asks: “Was anything true, in fact?” This question speaks to Flanagan’s existential state as he proceeds to enter some form of a trip that, on my reading, lasts essentially until the fifty-third page (only to begin again, or re-intensify several pages later).   This question also speaks to the reader’s state as they long to pull some “sense” from the book itself. Billed as a detective novel, Agent Dickinson uses that genre’s archetypes, imagery, and common objects just enough to get away with using the label. Indeed, just as frequently as you read lines as if pulled from a campy detective show with an avant-garde twist (“Girls, they whistle, though whistling not, as awoken were shields with serif S.O.S.’s fonts, calling blue, tangle day, a bluish piercing foreign on disturbance, fostered shield, now, is that signage saying blue? Who is that, substance, Sheriff Raphael, who??”), you get caught in sweeps...
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Man with Head Removed by Sam Robinson

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Man with Head Removed is a volume of “new and collected” poetry. Comprising New Age Self-Help (chapbook), Nature Poems (full length), Boston Spleen (chapbook—prose poems), and Man with Head Removed (recent poems), it possesses the weight and variety necessitated by a “collected” volume. Indeed, if there is a critique that can be leveled against the book it is simply that it is so long, its weight and variety at times overpowering the power each book has on its own.   That said, there is a clear through-line articulated by the book/s, explicitly addressed in the first poem: The “being” of a flickering flame is a dance (occur ance ), the so instantaneous as to almost not have happened growth and decay of which is captured by caesurae in the line “decay growth and decay—again growth! // at the same time! it decays!” Here, Robinson uses the flickering flame as an almost Transcendental symbol (in the sense of words being signs of natural facts, and natural facts bein...
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