cover image Boredom, Vice, and Poverty

Boredom, Vice, and Poverty

Michael Odom. CreateSpace, $13.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-4953-0722-5

Working with timeless material such as the creation of man and the tug of war between Love and Death, Odom creates, through his language, a prickly backdrop for contemporary revisions of these stories. Readers will find Eve with a “breeding-ball of tiny snakes/ writhing as with coffee,” and Death asking “for Bold Roast/ With a double shot/ And no room for cream.” Though his series of “Boredom Poems” make good on their title, he has moments of bizarre and captivating lyric upsurge. “Bed in/ The twigs and dirt (chilled in your light, my friend/ Selene) my childish lover, my gamine/ Of heroin, is undermauled,” he writes in one of many untitled sonnets. But the book also features several images, one a crude drawing by a relative of a naked woman being drained of her blood by a gas pump, overtly illustrating how for every startling turn of phrase Odom finds other ways to undermine his own work. One begins to wonder if this act is conceptual. “I pause,” he writes in “First Sunday of War,” “Iced tea/ Takes cold to my throat,/ To my stomach,/ To my veins, and I/ Am castled.” Oddly, this wavering between high-brow and low, between the captivating and cringe-inducing, makes for an earnest, if grating, collection. [em](BookLife) [/em]