cover image Sugar Pill

Sugar Pill

Drew Gardner. Krupskaya, $11 (70pp) ISBN 978-1-928650-14-0

""Missile silos implode in North Dakota/ copping the absence/ as I shrunk back in horror at the use I was making of my intelligence..."" writes Drew Gardner in ""Black Atlantic Sky,"" one of 12 perfectly calibrated, mostly monostichic poems in Sugar Pill. The editor of Snare magazine and a percussionist who has collaborated frequently with other poets, Gardner is concerned with keeping time of all sorts here: ""Homeostasis"" finds ""body systems regulated within normal bounds/ tethered seven shrimp to a platform""; ""The Manufacturers"" know that ""each muscle fiber can support 1000x its own weight/ set up to maintain systems of feeling/ whether we are included with our descendants"" or not; the title panacea charts ""footprints of darkening work/ we cannot fall out of."" Readers will not want to fall out of this one.