Pop Vérité

Poet, novelist, and playwright Linmark (Leche) captivates in his latest collection, which operates almost as if it were a personal variation on the Voyager probe’s Golden Record, cataloguing, instead of whale song and anatomical diagrams, Robert Mapplethorpe, Donna Summer, and John Waters, among others. Beyond the dizzying name-dropping (his “Abecedarian for John Waters” includes such inspired phrases as “Divine’s dog-shit-eating dilemma” and “Yowling at the all-night Marguerite Duras film fest”), the collection’s core lies in Paris. The anxiety of 21st-century life converges with the fantasy of expat writers whose lives seeded a modern mythology. The greater historical past meets personal stories as Linmark laments “going/ gray without a partner” and a “post-Senior Prom/ blow-job” promised 17 years prior. The personal, too, intersects with pop culture: with whiplash wit and heart, the Filipino-American Linmark tackles “history’s unending/ clichés” in “The Asian Houseboy Makes a Cameo in The Valley of the Dolls,” and in “The Helpless” he reimagines the much-loathed 2011 period drama The Help as a Filipino flick that’s perfect for “trans-oceanic crossings.” Alternating between diaristic prose and breathless bursts of verse, Linmark delivers provocations, lamentations, and sketches on the metro. At each of his wild tour stops, Linmark continuously reveals a world made charming by his personal pluck and unending elation. (Aug.)