O’Clock Press

52 pages, $12

Review by Matt Pincus

Juan Garcia Madero, the supposed writer of the poems in Everybody Suffers is the protagonist of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. He is an observer and student of the leaders of the visceral realist poetry movement, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. One knows Madero writes poems, which are never seen in Bolano’s text, thus giving Longabucco the impetus to posit himself as a fictional scholar and translator.

Everybody Suffers carries elements of imagist poetry from H.D. and Pound that mince with transgression, political rebellion, and hint at an echo, or reverie from French Symbolists haunting the text. Also, Longabucco’s speakers use Bolano’s fictional elements and themes in poems such as “Age of Enlightenment,” which draws directly from the corrupt policemen in 2666 who are complicit in the murders of young women around the town of Santa Teresa. Longabucco, as a fictional translator of a fictional character’s poetry, shows the government’s complicity in corrupt drug cartels, something more present now than ever after 43 students went missing in Iguala, Mexico two months ago:

and then destroyed the hands with acid
and then tore up the autopsy report
and then cremated the body and the prints
and threw all the ashes in the ashcan
and then buried the ashcan in a desert
not on earth.

Continue reading →