a new measure (poetry report)

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...