In these poems, the narrator keeps getting interrupted. Call waiting, overhead airplanes, answering machine messages, hovercrafts strafing the beach, the sound of distant traffic. Machine noises become a metaphor for distance, the difficulty of connection, relationships like merging into another lane without looking and hoping for a wreck in which no one (really) gets hurt. These are perceptive, beautiful poems that grope through language to find the random acts which language confers with beauty. Sometimes, though, the poems are too random, too minimalist – it’s as if a few stanzas are missing. Relationships become too assumed, random acts of noise too patterned and I get annoyed at Brown for not working harder. When Machines That Speak work, the acts of a device ridden world serve not so much as interruption but as confirmation of what Brown and the reader already now. When the book doesn’t work, the mystery of machinery becomes expected and characters we don’t really know or care about are broken up before we have a chance to get to know anything. Still, a confident work from a Montreal writer and publisher and small press activist whose efforts deserve to be read as much as they deserve to be supported. (HN)
chapbook, 24 pgs, $8, Andy Brown, Conundrum Press, 266 Fairmount W., Montreal, Quebec, H2V 2G3