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TOOT SWEET Daniel Owen 64 pages, paperback Cover by Pareesa Pourian ISBN: 0-935992-41-3 Copyright © 2015 $15.00 "Like its punning title, Dan Owen's agile first collection is playful but with a subtext of urgency. "We ask for nothing less than new / means of new streets," he writes, but the request goes unanswered - which is what happens when poems end but whatever prompted them persists. Here, the prompts range from the cannibalism of cockroaches to the terrifying specter of 'the Capital skull,' from an image of '40 active war heads" to an intuition of existing in "a prison of safety.' The cumulative effect is one of a quiet, persistent claim to some kind of agency against the odds. Even the puns and wordplay in Toot Sweet make for small acts of resistance, not in lieu of but in line with action in the world ('things happen so we / take to the bridge') - for puns also have the power to divert traffic from its prescribed course. Owen has developed a disabused but undeterred lyric mode, fit to metabolize 'futurity's bitty / beads of fat.'" Anna Moskovakis "Toot Sweet, Daniel Owen's exquisitely scaled long poem full of jaunts and song and a wry foregrounding of diction, strums delight. And values bewilderment. And acknowledges, without giving into, the power of despair. Its line--the sense of where you are in a poem--goes horizontal when you think you've caught its rhythm, never settles, is unmachine-like and possessed by touch. This makes for a pleasure-giving, complex, and quite beautiful read, open to anyone who looks for such qualities in this world. Anselm Berrigan UPDATED ORDERING INFO COMING SOON RETURN TO BOOK LIST |
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