Book Notes: CHINA COWBOY by Kim Gek Lin Short

Kim’s book is provocative, wrenching, and accomplishes that oh so rare feat of both giving me pause and making me want to rush into the next page, of wanting to savor the language while the content leaves my skin crawling.  But instead of writing a review thinking about the intersection of these things in this verse novel (?) about Patsy Clone/La La, a girl kidnapped from Hong Kong and abused by Ren/Bill, a pedophiliac Clint Eastwood who schizophrenically frames his abuse as art, I decided to just record one of the song-poems as a song. There’s something about poets writing songs that makes me immediately want to discover how it would sound out loud. There’s also something about the world of this book and the world of the language of this book that seems expansive enough to want to enter and linger. It’s the same kind of thing that inspires fan fiction. Which this basically is.  This one goes out to La La from No #1 fanboy:

September1987 Age 10

I didn’t say it was good. Just that the book is infectious. Watch out.

Lit Bridge Allows Me To Disclose Criminal Childhood

Hey, so guess what? I was a childhood squatter. Or something like that is revealed in this interview Lit Bridge did with me about overcoming obstacles as a writer. I know none of you need my advice, but I tried to add some glitter to this one.

Also, do not image search child squatter. It is horribly depressing.

If There Were Two Kinds of Poems People Automatically Screw Up

these would be the War Poem (too facile/who cares what you have to say about what you read in the New Yorker) and Systems Poem (no center/too discursive). I think Philip Metres nailed them both. Here’s a review about mostly the systems part.