cover image Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book

Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book

Stacy Doris, . . Roof, $12.95 (83pp) ISBN 978-1-931824-18-7

If a football team composed of players from the Popul Vuh and The Tibetan Book of the Dead were forced into citizenship rites that involved playing school football at "Twisted or Deception High," the results would be something like the latest, beautiful, uncategorizable work from Doris. Published nearly simultaneously with the very different but similarly daring Knot (University of Georgia), Cheerleader's Guide tracks society's bases in timeless, evil small-group dynamics through an ingenious formal gambit. Using a withering faux-naïve diction ("victory / takes brains but not for thinking"), Doris imbues characters like "N0t Righ+ N0w," "Laugh1ng M1rrors Puk1ng" and "Dry-Me Out" with a violence and scale that feels at once queasily of-the-political-minute and gorgeously timeless. Each page contains a few short stanzas at the top, and, at bottom, a football diagram with x's, o's and lines showing where the characters move in relation to one another. Each reads like a sudden-death play at fourth down, where "what's human is formations / and drills" and "The Team's ball is just / an ovoid knife"; the whole resembles an ironic instruction manual for joining a society stuck in a very sick game. (July)