The Daily Glance**
Geoffrey Gatza's Secrets of My Prison House is the book of a poet very aware of the current state of American poetry--we can tell that from the wide array of techniques that he uses in his poems. In some poems he seems post-avant with his his anti-absorptive techniques combined with the "I":
The cover that is making headlines
is of me wearing a bunny suit
I have this little baby with me
The house is under constructions
Writing a check is easy
Yet other poems take us more down the lines of visual-oriented poetry. In fact, his series Stopoped reminds me quite a bit of the pwoermds of Geof Huth.
bandadventurege
scotchopen
Gatza even has a poem relating to the AWP conference, "St. John of God Patron saint of booksellers Goes to AWP," and he has a poem dedicated to Didi Menendez, another poet/poetry/publishing/small press pillar like Gatza is himself. In all, it's a good book that I think could function both as an introduction to Gatza and contemporary poetry.
**This book reminds me how much I'm still just a kid who like new toys. I was planning to read a translation book of senryu(s) that I received from Japan back in 2003, but when I opened the mail today, I was surprised to find Geoffrey Gatza's book (and a bunch of candy with it), so I pushed the translation book aside for tomorrow and read through Gatza's book.
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