cover image Vertical's Currency: New and Selected Poems

Vertical's Currency: New and Selected Poems

Joel Lewis. Talisman House Publishers, $13.95 (134pp) ISBN 978-1-883689-83-4

Commuting in from northern New Jersey, Lewis constituted almost the entire graduating class of the fifth-generation of New York School poets, studying with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley and Maureen Owen, among others. His well-caffeinated poems deflect his teachers energy for the quotidian away from private lives and back toward public things: civic statues, fast food, popular music (jazz mainly, but also 70s AOR retreads like Traffic, Steve Miller, and Pablo Cruise), and the rubble that constantly radiates up from the rubble. Lewis is an acute observer of Americas ever-unmentionable class wars, and his catalogues of pungent references and poignant rumors make memorable what was only meant to hold the attention between impulse purchases. His New Jersey has been uneasily partitioned between parties loyal to Lou Costello and to William Carlos Williams, and like his less-abstruse Hoboken neighbor Mark Leyner, he appears to be a double agent. Winter Evening, Passaic, Hoboken Early Sunday Morning, North Jersey Gutter Helmet and Route 3, Nutley (Mad)the last rolls through the town where Valium gets madeare warm, sturdy and truthful landscapes. Nervous Fabric, a devastating and funny sequence (I dont have a cow!/ Nobody here has a cow! Were Jews,/ not farmers!) makes explicit Lewiss connection to the great Yiddish aphorists. A journalist and anthologist besides, Lewis stands to become a national presence with this very negotiable currency. (May)