Man Suit Book

There were quite a few surprises in the Man Suit. The biggest was its form, meaning this is poetry that actually has the form of prose, and many poems are often presented as short paragraphs. There are more traditional verses, but even those "flow" like prose if you were to unwind them.

However, the added rhythm of the verses brings life into them. I found the more syncopated cadence pretty effective, like in
"Death is
falling
gently
onto all our collars
and it is
spreading out
on the floor
and then
a million things"

I mean, it's a pretty spastic poem to my ears, but "it works," it's intense, has strong images, it's short and sharp like a dagger. (I suppose it ends more traditionally than other poems in the book.) Unfortunately, the Man Suit is not always like that, and especially the longer compositions left me lukewarm. Probably the many images they evoke were just too confusing for me, or did not resonate as well.

Oh, the images... very surrealist: "At a Halloween party, a lung went as a haircut, and a haircut went as a lung." There's a lot of dark humor too, which is sometimes pretty funny, and some recurring sexual references, which came out a little awkward, I gotta say. Not to say the latent misogyny I felt here and there.

Going back to the "paragraph poems," they are often like the lines that a demented news reporter would read every midnight. I found their absurdity funny but tiring after a while. Perhaps it's a book to be read slowly. I read it kind of fast, and likely that's bad because you may get overwhelmed by it, or at least I did. Re-reading non-sequentially might be appropriate.