The Daily Glance

Lars Palm's for good behavior is a e-chapbook filled with prose poems. The poems play at the border of flash fiction and prose poetry, for they tell little stories that often contain history or references to cultural events. For example, "(wake up screaming)" seems to recount the basic plot of a horror film. A bunch of teens go into the woods to drink and see a man with a mask and become scared. Yet, they are somewhat relieved to find there is no face behind the mask. Palm is riffing on a standard horror plot but changing the ending. Most of these stories have an element of the unusual to them, such as the poem about the California of Russia that disappears. Ultimately, these pieces are more global than any other poetry that I've read lately. Palm jumps from his home base in the Canary Islands to Russia to Zimbabwe to Denmark to Sweden, and this book makes me think about global poetry movements fostered by the Internet. Will language traditions become more important than nations in the future?

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