The semi-narrative poetry of T. Anders Carson runs the gamut of emotional cadences, frustration, joy and desperation all appear in these poems like streams of water flowing together in the same river. It is the current of bitter anger that unifies these poems and makes their confessional overtones not only bearable but understandable. Abortable cut documents a suicide; a man looks back through the death of his mother to see his childhood: “I found colored pills/attached in LEGO/fashion surrounding her/innate heaviness.” I preferred the poems, however, that relied less on a narrative and more on Carson’s vitriolic, talented and completely exaggerated sense of language. Bile struts down the boulevard is an example of the kind of poem Carson should write more of, image and memory and self-reflected history warped into one transfiguration of every possibility.
chapbook / publisher: Alpha Beat Press / main creator: T. Anders Carson / $5 (US) / Alpha Beat Press, c/o Dave Christy, 31A Waterloo St., New Hope, PA, 18938 for orders, other info T. Anders Carson, RR#2, Portland, ON, K0G 1V0 email: [email protected]