Personationskin

Parker is one of the oddest poet’s you’re likely to meet. With a hyperactive sense of humor and an irreverence to match, Parker creates poems that push so hard at their own boundaries, they’re likely to explode at any moment. “REJOICE EVERYTHING IS TRUE,” says Parker, and he almost means it—this debut is full of unsustainable assertions: “LOAFING IS NOT JUST AN ARTFORM,/ IT IS ARTFORM”; “I sit in my window, a talking monkey”; “Night’s nothing but a low hum from the wiregrid of goodbyes/ and getwells we are.” No poet has had this kind of simultaneous reverence for and disregard of the poetic tradition since Bill Knott. Many of Parker’s poems take the form of little disjunctive stories (“My name is Regina I wear glasses// and sometimes only one shoe./ This is my house”), while others are frustrating and entertaining lists of mostly capitalized blips and stream of consciousness observations: “PLAYING TO THE PEANUT GALLERY// TAKING A PISS ON A PILE OF URINAL ICE IN DUBLIN.” Some readers will slam this book shut as soon as they open it; others will keep it open in their heads forever. (Jan.)