Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"I am always doing this. Walking around the old neighborhood, always/ sixteen, moody and stealing cigarettes," writes Dickman (Mayakovsky's Revolver) in a collection concerned with those liminal, adolescent years when the forward motion of growing up is both necessary and dangerous. The poems are ferocious and hardened by a backdrop of addiction and poverty. Dickman recalls his sister battling addiction while taking care of him and his twin brother, "her heart like a sack of rabbits, skull-sized/ motors in the dark," and a neighborhood where the "men happen to the women/ and the women happen to the children," with each new day arriving "like a van/ with its windows// painted black." A series of poems marked by the hour runs through the collection, beginning at one a.m. and progressing in stages to midnight. Here, Dickman departs from his broader narrative using chant-like anaphora: "This amphibian inner-organ green./ This smoke./ This pillowcase and razors and salt and trying to be a human being." For Dickman, the wilderness of youth becomes a kind of wonderland: "when I think of the second grade I think about fall leaves,/ black oaks, and urine." In Dickman's poems, readers observe as the bright-eyed potential of youth is shattered by the devastation of adulthood's onset. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
Life falls far short of wonderful in -Dickman's autobiographical, Peanuts-eye view of growing up in working-class 1980s Portland, OR. While adults are largely absent-and abusive or indifferent when present-their children are out skateboarding, teasing guard dogs, and bullying other kids. One chronically violent childhood friend even grows up to be a white supremacist ("He must feel/ so safe in his skin./ He must feel like he belongs"). Dickman's own perspective is that of the victim trying to survive, grow, and be receptive to whatever small pleasures are possible ("Who looks at something empty and doesn't think about what/ they could fill it with? No one."). His ability not only to recollect but also to relive his childhood in the present moment, as if boy and man coexisted and conversed with each other ("you will have to/ stay in your body for much longer/ than you really want to."), manifests a hard-won wisdom that 13 somewhat contrived experiments-a series of anaphoric improvisations on the hours of the day-can't diminish. -VERDICT More grounded and less flashy than its two predecessors (e.g., Mayakovsky's Revolver), Dickman's latest offers some surprisingly affective moments within its harsh, dystopian milieu. For larger poetry and some YA collections.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
