W i n g' d, the new collection from Kyle Simonsen, is a compact selection of 15 poems which seek to examine a new world where everything shits and shimmers. A near-futuristic post-apocalyptic junk yard marred by corporate and/or robotic whores. A world where fauna rule and that near-forgotten beast,
the homo-sapien, struggles to survive.
monkeys peering in curtains made of monkeys
at shame made of monkeys on the face
of a monkey in a cage made of monkey legbones
and monkey ribs held together with a familiar sinew
(my minions are everywhere)
Simonsen makes fantastic use of language and the everyday, once raw, then poetic, with lines such as
'she sheds skin cells by the sea full'
'she wets the wick with tonguetip,
touches each and every clit'
(boy meats, girl meats)
And:
ordered one martini too many
and flushed it with a tampon that
refused to go dark, refuted the night's
insistence on the existential...
(canyon flood)
I love the imagery here. It's a very visual collection, viscous almost, with the advancing, technological world gaining on us,
billboards are falling
on their faces
along highway eighty-one
steel-ribbed camels burying
abortion-critiquing expression
in the sorghum instead of sand
(the moral interests of october)
threatening our creativity (said the machine to the poet), and in homage to Don Quixote/War of the Worlds, threatening our very lives, reigning in the humans with their giant tentacles in often they have built their own windmills and ode on the death of a favorite flora drowned in a fishtank full of corporate octupi.
So maybe this collection would more aptly be called t e n t a c l' d. Whatever. It's a brilliant first collection. Read it.
