Cutting to the chase.

The only Poet Laureate of the United States I ever met was Mark Strand, back in the day, at UC Irvine. For all the godliness and ethereal value the title implies, I'm here to tell you he was 100% human. He was also a damn good writer, the kind of poet whose work was accessible and artistic in the unique manner of good poetry.

Some mumble-mumble years on we have a new ex-Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins, who has managed to take poetry back to the masses without compromise. His latest book, 'Ballistics' (Random House ; September 8, 2008 ; $24) is a great opportunity to buy first edition hardcover poetry that will seem eminently worth the purchase price. The cover image for this book is telling and important, because it visually conveys the effect of a good poem. In a brief moment, your world is sheared in two; before and after you read the poem. Poetry is about jarring perception and changing your vision of the world around you. Collins knows how to do that and makes it look ridiculously easy.

Of course, it's not at all easy. The polish and power that Collins brings to his work is the result of a unique immersion in life and language. He's able to use pretty simple language to achieve complex goals, revising what we see in our world into a richer, more refined perspective. Here's a clip from No Things:

This love of petty things
part natural from the slow eye of childhood
part a literary affectation,

this attention to the morning flower
and let in the day to a fly
strolling along the rim of a wineglass–

are we just avoiding the one true destiny,
when we do that?

He concludes:

What good is the firefly,
the droplet running along the green leaf,
or even the bar of soap spinning around the bathtub

When ultimately we are meant to be
banging away on the mystery
as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?

Banging away on nothingness itself,
some with our foreheads
others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry.

And thusly I rest my case. Poetry you can read, that you can actually look foreward to reading, not just once, but more than once. We need to bang our head against these words, to have Collins point out to us those parts of our lives that might otherwise go unnoticed but are actually more important than any other. Our perceptions of our lives are alas skewed by our senses. Seeing, hearing, touch, taste, smell, our emotions; they show us the stars and planets and solar systems, the galaxies in our personal, pocket universes, and that's well and good. It's best we not plunge into the suns, the black holes, it's smart to land gently on the planets that will serve us best. But more than half of our universe is made up of Dark Matter; stuff we don’t see but that we know must affect us deeply. Collins shines a light on the Dark Matter with fresh simple language and poetic intelligence. Not many of us have it; all of us need it. Here's a book you can consult daily. Read the poems once; then read them again. There's no shortage of mysteries in our lives that require the perceptions of poetry to unravel.

Something in the air with reds and blacks

MS Found on a Hard Disk

One of the joys of trolling through the stacks of Logos used books in the past few years has been my luck in looking for one thing while discovering another. So, like any good bookhound, I'm always on the alert for an early George Pelecanos novel. Those old Nick Stefanos books look unimposing but fetch a few pretty pennies should one be willing to part with them. And since they look so normal, I can see someone cleaning out the shelves without thinking about it. After all, at Logos, I found a perfect condition, first edition UK hardcover of Phil Rickman's 'Crybbe', published in the US as 'Curfew'. I t set me back about seven bucks. So I troll through the R's then work backwards to the P's, looking for Pelecanos ... but finding Victor Pelevin. One of my earliest interviews for KUSP was with Ira Sher, who told me I'd like Victor Pelevin. First, I found 'The Life of Insects', a satire about Russia that involves humans who transform into bloodsucking mosquitoes. A couple years later, Canongate started a line of Classics, which included Pelevin's 'The Helmet of Horror', a chat-room twist on the Minotaur myth. As an old Unix shell script programmer, I had to admire a novel that compared myths to mental shell scripts.

Which brings us to 'The Sacred Book of the Werewolf' (Viking / Penguin Putnam ; September 8, 2008 ; 425.95), Pelevin's first new US novel in six years. We're told that it's a big seller in Russia, which in the current political climate, may or may not be seen as a hearty endorsement. Pelevin's novels are nothing if not political, filled with sharp jabs at everybody and everything. Even if the cover looks, well, a bit familiar.

'The Sacred Book of the Werewolf' begins with the sort of meta-fictional cheese that I just love. It's a "Commentary by Experts" which basically says that the whole shebang is a farrago of incompetently cobbled-together lies. Yes, lies, all lies! "...supposedly found on the hard disk of a laptop computer discovered in 'dramatic circumstances' in one of Moscow's parks." Now look, how can you not love a novel that gets mysterious hard drives, ball lightning, and a few Russian variations of the word "fuck" crammed into the first three pages?

The narrative turns out to be the entertaining story of A Hu-Li (much fun is had with the obscene implications of the Russian version of the name), a shape shifting werefox in all senses of the word fox. When human, she's a fifteen year-old Moscow prostitute who uses the special organ seen as her "tail" to charm men into thinking they've had some kind of awesome sex shortly before she consumes their life force. Problem is she's pretty damn old and still technically, uh, a "weergin" as Andy Warhol's Dracula would have it. Enter Alexander, a Russian werewolf with connections to Big Oil. No wonder they're such vicious cut-throats there. Stir ungently for 333 pages, adding dollops of sardonic humor, over-the-top supernatural sex and scathing political satire. Bathe in blood, lather, rinse, repeat until you discover just who and what you truly are.

Howlingly familiar.

Kathryn Petruccelli Reports from the Ping Pong Literary Magazine Party : Interview With Ping Pong Poetry Editor James Maughn

Mr. Houshang Ebtehaj, aka H. E. Sayeh.

Today's Agony Column Podcast News Report continues the audio from the Ping Pong Magazine release party. This time, Kathryn Petrucelli speaks with Ping Pong Poetry Editor James Maughn about their interest in international and translated poetry. Maughn reads from the work of Mr. Houshang Ebtehaj, who writes under the pen name of H. E. Sayeh. Here's a link to the audio that will link you to a wider world.

Dust jacket.

Andrew Davidson's 'The Gargoyle' is getting a fascinating treatment – in the bookstores and literary reviews. Perhaps it's to be expected, given the title of the work and the unusual content, but where I've looked, it's getting shelved and reviewed with the science fiction genre, and I'm here to tell you that's not right. I've read plenty of science fiction, fantasy and horror genre fiction, and this is not a work that should be classified with genre fiction, nor should it be primarily offered to genre fiction readers. I do think it will appeal to them, but it's not going to strike them as being genre fiction, even if it does include an up-close and personal vision of hell itself. 'The Gargoyle' is a work of pure literary fiction, period. Readers who like literary adventure fiction are going enjoy the heck out of 'The Gargoyle'. Readers of the entire raft of genre fiction variants will as well, but this work is not written with them, or anyone else, for that matter, in mind.

Front cover beneath dust jacket.

In the first of a series of reports from the Ping Pong Magazine Issue Two Release party, Kathryn Petrucelli speaks with the Ping Pong Magazine Editor-in-chief Maria Garcia Teusch. Readers wanting to find out what is in – and how to get in – a prestigious start-up literary journal will find just the advice they're looking for in this audio interview link.

09-02-08: A 2008 Interview With Clive Barker Part 2

Happy man.

"You can't do things by halves"

In the second part of my interview with Clive Barker, we talked about how he came to create "The Books of Blood", and in particular, some of the more striking stories within. I have to admit that I was rather surprised how quickly Barker took to my questions about "In the Hills, The Cities", and as well by how personal the interview became in the second half. You'll find out precisely why you probably did not see the movie version of "Midnight Meat Train" and all about the creation of those Sphere paperback versions of 'The Books of Blood'.

I also asked Clive about the infamously lagging collection, 'The Scarlet Gospels', which is essentially labeled as 'Books of Blood 2' so to speak. But he spills that the current version is some 250K words long, which suggests that it will get split and splintered for at least some portion of the US market. Frankly, this is easily one of the most intimate and intense interviews I've ever done. Sometimes Ithink I missed my calling and should have considered a career in therapy or counseling, but so long as I continue to get to talk to people as interesting as Clive, I'm a happy guy. Here's a link to the MP3 of our conversation.

09-01-08: A 2008 Interview With Clive Barker Part 1

The Book In Question (#1)

Barker & Friends.