WhimsyLand

I got my Abraham Lincoln yesterday a few short days after Paypal'ing to Kasey and Anne.  I went for the subscription, not wanting to devote my entire journal budget to the attractive Seventeen Year Plan (only $968).  I was laughing because it came the same day as Ploughshares, and I was thinking my head would probably explode if I read them at the same time.  As it turns out, the Ploughshares was all fiction, so the damage should be minimal.  As one would expect, AL is filled with sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, chickpeas, and very inventive writing.  The actual volume is much like 32 Poems, inexpensively bound, small enough to fit into your pocket, and generally appealing to your no-nonsense, it's-all-about-the-work sensibilities.  Gary Sullivan has a prose poem (well, I think that's what it is) about People Who Had Their Cake and Ate It Too which takes place at a county fair.  I was tickled to see osCommerce mentioned in the next poem a few lines below the "cute little nippy bottles" of Negro Modelo.  One has to expect intros such as CA Conrad's "when Mother first grew / tentacles from her / shoulders Frank found a / path of ink across his / breakfast ...", because, after all, this isn't your mother's poetry.  Alli Warren contributes a post-post-modern villanelle where many are dead and somebody eats meat and there's a party.  In the second poem, fish and chickpeas are consumed (which sounds pretty good, actually), and the third poem ends with "The only chocolate you find is the chocolate / you cook with", so my culinary-poetic inclinations were satisfied in 3 short pages (4, if you count Gary's Cakes).  Matt McCloud realigns an impersonal (" ... he has been assigned to segregation / will be taped from the torso up").  Rodney Koeneke describes Etruria, which was apparently "Napoleon's contrivance" ... actually there's a lot of contrivance in this poem, and "the postage stamp carries no stain of the eminence it represents", which I thought was a pretty damned fine line.  Sharon Mesmer reminds me that anyone who "thinks Starship Troopers was a good movie" is probably a true fascist, even though I always liked the movie with its weird outtake commercials for The Empire and the sad fact that the hero never got intimate with Denise Richards and how much Jake Busey looks like his dad.  Nada Gordon has a couple of poems where I could barely hang on like some carnival ride right up to the point where the "Tigers fuck on the carpet / You must eat your neck", which I admit threw me for a moment.  Omigod, Sandra Simonds "ate lint from an empty tin can of chickpeas".  There is a strange connection between A. Lincoln and garbanzos, but I'll be damned if I know what it is.  Shanna Compton does Tony Danza where everybody gets a guidebook, talks about "the internets" like George Jr., and find love "shoved up underneath that dumpster full of used avants".  Michael Magee wants to know Is It Just Me Or Is Lebanon Starting To Look A Little Foxy? which even includes an equation (internet = a defaced poster for a 10-yr-old sexpot).  Lanny Quarles is next up with Tzadik to Golem, Come in Golem!  in which you will find the delightful phrase "used in diagnostic sphygmology / by the Palace grannies".  Bill Luoma was almost unparseable, but I think that's what he wants to be ("stop the loach is tilting mobilinga I see sue / acqua bonnie hobbe katapepsi mountain dew").  Rachel Dakarian has 3 poems, including Sexxy War Kriminal where a broken dish can be reborn as a princess.  Drew Gardner mentions Limbaughs right before Katie Degentesh puts them in a title.  Weird!  Anyway, it's certainly a lot of fun and even deep in places, and you should go buy one before Kasey runs out of staples.