Learn to Love Explosives

Poetry. If you were to listen to a middle-aged Holden Caulfield, you might hear a voice like the one in Geoff Woolf's gut-punchingly funny and irreverently honest poems. Like Salinger's young protagonist, the speaker in these prose poems has no patience for phony Americans, such as a mountain climber being interviewed on TV: the way he kept saying the names of these companies that make his equipment I bet they pay him to blab like that. Later in the same poem, the speaker admits that he, too, might be bought for the right price: even though I'm pretty much a coward I have a feeling that there's this certain amount of dollars that would make me brave as shit too. The chatty vernacular--spare of unnecessary punctuation--echoes an American idiom as familiar as the Midwestern landscape where these poems dwell. Here, you might enter a tavern where God occasionally hangs out to stuff quarters in a jukebox or to play a divinely rigged game of pool, strong-arming patrons with bullish omnipotence. As these poems lead you to uncanny places, remember what the speaker says: Sometimes when a mime is making me uncomfortable and claustrophobic I have to remind myself that it was his choice to get in that imaginary box in the first place. Don't get me wrong. These poems aren't like a mime's make-believe box, but their uncanny nature challenges you to question your certainties. Woolf wields a fierce and genuine wit against flim-flam hopes, and his poems bring laughter and discomfort in equal measure.--Murray Shugars