cover image Last Instance

Last Instance

Dan Farrell. Krupskaya, $9 (61pp) ISBN 978-1-928650-01-0

Even at its most spare, the Canadian-born Farrell's prose poetry creates an atmosphere reminiscent of Kafka in its ever-recursive replays of alienating social formulas. Indeed, the poem ""K,"" centering around the narrator's ""phone tag"" relationship with an ever-ambiguous, eponymous love object, is as taut as short fiction: ""So K would call, begin to leave as though a message, then get me. Would K's roommate pass on this message, any? For the while, exchanging mail seemed a way. Letter, number, letter; number, letter, number. Letters add up to nothing."" Even the paratactic ""Avail,"" composed entirely of sentences from rote answers to a health questionnaire, builds Oulipo-inspired excessive repetition into a deadpan character who just can't determine what the hell he means: ""My current level of physical fitness is very pleasing to me. I have positive feelings about the way I approach my own physical health. Whether I recover from an illness depends in large part on what I myself do. My feelings of anger do not interfere with my work. In order to have good health, I have to act in a pleasing way to other more powerful individuals."" ""My Recognizance"" is a wonderfully rich skitter through Joycean sentence constructs and surface play, a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man who never quite has the epiphany. ""Pufferbluffing like a blowfish in a chowder,"" these and the nine other poems of this American debut confidently spelunk language's and life's endless capacity for creating boredom and anxiety--and their potential for explosive, neologistic self-creation. They are as fun as they are fastidious, like punk rock, or a slacker's elegant, stoical nihilism. (July) FYI: Krupskaya is a San Francisco-based press organized as a collective. Last Instance is one of four initial releases (see Notes, below).