'the smell of sunscreen makes me want to have already fucked this afternoon'this book has three sections: ‘shake,’ ‘let the people die,’ and ‘new haven.’ my interest in the book came from reading poems in ‘let the people die,’ and that is the section i liked the most
the poems in ‘let the people die’ vaguely resemble sonnets—they have 14 lines and some have rhymes although not a standard rhyme scheme—and they repeat lines
Desperate bastards breaking bottles
over the heads of other desperate bastards
[...]
Bastards beating bastards in the beautiful sunlight.
here is a poem from ‘let people die’
i felt a tone similar to ron silliman’s ‘ketjak’ when reading these because of the repeated lines and the fragments
there was a lot of humor in the book that i liked
This
birthday party is fucked without the karate
chop of love
+
I joined
this club to learn about billiards, and that’s it
the poems in the first and third sections, ‘shake’ and ‘new haven,’ had less/no repetition and usually longer sentences
here is a poem from ‘shake’
i liked a lot of lines in these sections, but the poems were harder for me to take in and intuitively understand as complete units
none of the poems in the book had titles, and because of that, it seemed like more of a whole instead of many separate poems
overall i felt a ‘clean’ tone from the book, which reminded me of t.s. eliot or something. i don’t mean it is very formal, but it doesn’t seem sloppy; it feels precise
this book was out in 2006 from wave books; it has 79 pages
i have written about another joshua beckman book
more on joshua beckman here
buy shake here or here
