NYQ Books

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. Continue reading →