A Daily Glance
Joseph Wood's chapbook Gutter Catholic Love Songs is one long sentence by punctuation which contains a multitude of ideas/experiences. It could be summed up by some of its lines:
one apparition
after the next dives into what's moving on the belt
like newsreel hooked up to a neurotic turbine
like the mental house pulling an industrial-sized roll
of toilet paper
As an aside, it has such a nice cover that I didn't really want to open it. It's hand stitched with a cover that double wraps over everything and ties with some black string. The paper crafting helps the experience because once you unwrap it, you have to read it at once, and the single piece is so full of ideas that flow into each other that I felt like I had opened something that then began to spill out in front of me. As for the poem, it deals with place, sex, myth, pop culture, suicide, and beliefs. It's catholic in the little "c" sense, but it also deals with Catholic issues, though with a great deal of hesitation. The love song part of the title only becomes clear in the last two stanzas, but once you get to the stanzas, a poem that seems to have meandered all of the sudden comes together in an image of a loved one.
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