cover image Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems, 1969-1999

Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems, 1969-1999

Bill Knott. BOA Editions, $15 (143pp) ISBN 978-1-880238-84-4

In 160 poems ranging from one-liners--""History"" consists of two words: ""Hope... goosestep""--to extended satires, Knott moves fluidly through a career's worth of poetic forms, employing everything from tanka to hendecasyllabics. Regardless of the form, however, this collection never swerves from the deliciously mordant sense of absurdity that first brought Knott attention in the '60s and '70s. While his work is often referential and straightforward (""The wind blows a piece of paper to my feet.// I pick it up.// It is not a petition for my death.""), Knott intensifies his lines, at times, by torquing syntax and fusing words: ""Knee-plenty take me. The topsheet teethes on us;/ the cunning foreskin heaps up nakedness."" Following his forms, Knott's subject matter spans from put-downs of the work of Eugenio Montale and Galway Kinnell to a satire on a singles cruise and scathing send-ups of consumerism. But while full of brilliant vitriol, Knott's absurdity sometimes bleeds into inanity, and his over-the-top style can be wearying: ""Fallen wart, comrade, hacked off by haste or/ the CIA, hey wart, whoa wart. Here you go,/ wartypoo, into this test-tube with you."" Nonetheless, this book stands as much-needed retrospective of one the more distinctive and talented poets to cast himself out of the counter-cultural ferment. (June)