NYQ Books

112 pages, $14.95

Review by Brian Fanelli

In his essay “Litany, Game, and Representation,” poet Tony Hoagland says that American poetry is informed by “new tensions, new understanding, and new possibility.” He adds that American poetry currently has no preference for “narration, description, or confessions of the autobiographical self,” and poems of the “new poetry” shoot off in dozens of aesthetic directions. In many ways, John Amen’s latest book, strange theater, is very much of the “new poetry” that Hoagland defines. The collection contains different aesthetic directions, prefers the surreal over straightforward narrative, and though many of the poems are dedicated to people, the poems generally resist the confessional and autobiographical.

There were shades of the confessional in Amen’s previous collections, but strange theater relies more on strange and unusual images and poetic leaps of imagination. In the beginning of one poem, “yr opportunity,” there is an image in the opening stanza about scorpions crawling across someone’s palms on a Saturday and waltzing, dragging along violins. In another poem, “the son we never had,” there are hints of confessional narrative in the opening line, but the poem, like many in the book, turns to the uncanny and the surreal, perhaps as a way to address more complex issues or even memory.

the son we never had
crawls through our kitchen
linoleum cracking beneath his impatience

he studies us as we sleep
sifting through our trophies & urns
clutching his banister of space

he wanders the dim corridors
glimpsing a bedroom that might’ve been his
streaking invisible prints on panes & ledges

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