Julien Poirier

Poirier is one of the founders of the superb Ugly Duckling Presse. This book is a collection of many individual pieces, many of them previously published. It's generally excellent, with a wonderful way with ambiguous antecedents and eccentric grammar. For example:

Nice guys
twist in the doped hood, they're
bored like the word, wonderful.

That's a wonderful line, with at least three ways to read the word "wonderful": a boring word, a quality of nice guys, a commentary on the sentence itself.

Poirier's strengths are his reliably surprising lines and his quirkiness (the book includes newspapers, letterhead, and cartoons). His weaknesses are his indebtedness to Frank O'Hara (glib jumping from one topic to the next, which is newsy and a nice antidote to seriousness, but also easy, and that seriousness no longer belongs to anyone worth rebelling against) and John Ashbery (though it is hard resist the lax but apparently enigmatic and ostensibly expressive non sequitur and dangling noun clause).

I would love to see a tighter book, with less randomness (or none!), and a continuously developed set of images and notions.… (meer)