The New Arcana, by John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris (A Review by Brian Fanelli)

109 pages/$14.95

Too often, poetry is reduced to long-winded lectures in a classroom or pages in obscure literary journals. It’s rare to find poets willing to joke about what the process has become and the race within the academy to add more journal credits to one’s academic CV, but in their collaborative, mixed-genre collection, The New Arcana, John Amen and Daniel T. Harris offer a blazing satire of academia and a critique of the hyper-consumerism in American culture.

The New Arcana is broken into five sections and filled with absurd characters that had me laughing harder and harder after each turn of the page. The book mixes poetry, fiction, drama, and random photos that look like they were pasted from a Google search. The result is a hysterical satire that should be read by academics that take themselves too seriously.

My favorite section is the first, which features the characters Jughead Jones, Sadie Shorthand, Yolanda the Crone, Albert the Bore, and others. For the most part, Jughead and Sadie were the most memorable to me, especially since the first few pages highlight some of their ridiculous, pseudo-intellectual lines. On one page, Sadie says,”Mathematics is a thousand ladders to nowhere. Theology is a newborn sibyl cooling in the darkness.” Their actions remind me of hipster intellectuals I knew in college, trying to outsmart each other in dive bars or diners.

Amen and Harris enhance the spoof by developing backstory and history for the characters. Sadie is given credit for creating a book called The Crazy Tape, and the writers brilliantly added fake blurbs and journal reviews about it, perhaps to prove how academics strive to find the next hot movement, no matter how obscure it is. One of the fake reviews calls The Crazy Tape, “her (Sadie’s) generation’s literary Big Bang,” adding that Sadie “is like a demiurge in a postmodern Genesis.”

The first section also works best when it addresses consumerism and our appetite for destruction and human tragedy, themes that play out in most of the other sections too. On one page, Sadie is pondering buying a “multi-slice CT scanner, some baklava, an HD television.” A few pages earlier, one of the characters is drawn to a car crash and watches with other gawking drivers, unable to turn away.

As the book progresses, the characters become more bizarre. Section two features a character named Constance Carbuncle who has to undergo a competency test, and during the trial, she speaks utter gibberish to the judge. As in the first section, here Amen and Harris use outlandish comments by other characters to provide the history of some of the protagonists. A painter named Albay Thompson is quoted in the section through his fake memoir. He describes Constance’s eyebrows as “eaves of a floating palace, perches for disenfranchised griffins.”

What’s especially impressive is that Amen and Harris keep the farce going throughout the book. Even the author bios are just as off the wall as the rest of the collection and feature Amen and Harris wearing goofy goggles, though they stepped forth from some futuristic reality. The New Arcana serves as a reminder to not take publishing and academia so seriously, and it offers a sharp critique of consumerism and our culture’s appetite for destruction, tragedy, and the misfortunes of others.

Brian Fanelli’s poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, The Portland Review, Inkwell, Boston Literary Magazine, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Word Riot, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Front Man, and his first full-length collection is forthcoming through Unbound Content. He resides in Pennsylvania and teaches creative writing at Keystone College. Visit him at www.brianfanelli.com.