cover image Change Machine

Change Machine

Bruce Covey. Noemi (SPD, dist.), $15 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-1-934819-34-0

Covey (Reveal: All Shapes & Sizes) offers a Sargasso Sea of postmodern phraseologies, a post-hipster stack of repurposed self-consciousness, a sometimes sarcastic and defiantly ample take on the way we live right at this moment, and%E2%80%94at its best%E2%80%94a glorious mess. "Quoting me exactly might be better, or at least/ Waiting until the white-haired man walks forward," he muses, "I just don't know/ Which two-way window will be." Covey is editor-in-chief of Coconut Books and its eponymous online journal, and his poems bear the sophisticated marks of life online: "Rows of wires convey electricity from circuit to station./ Having as much to do with a poem as a postage stamp." The collection's early lines ("I know what it's like to be covered in frantic X's and O's") recall the explorations of New York School poets such as Ted Berrigan and the up-to-date lyricism of Dobby Gibson. As the collection progresses, such wryness gives way to broader concerns of pastiche and satire, expressed in lists as well as in lengthy stanzas and curt prose blocks. Such works may get old fast, and they seem to know it. For now, though, these satirical pages could easily make Covey into a social media darling; they may well make this his breakthrough comedic book. (May)