TRANSNATIONAL MUSCLE CARS
Jeff Derksen, . . Talonbooks, $12.95 (128pp) ISBN 978-0-88922-473-5
Surfacing from an improbable semantic gumbo that has absorbed Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism" and the class-crossing ripostes of Oscar Wilde's theatric butlers, Derksen's lava-paced comedic discharge positions itself right in the mainstream of the saltier, sparring realms of political discourse, action and advertising: "I stand/ before you asking to be memorable/ for my memorabilia and/ symptomatic for my mottoes/ in these times when we are told/ that movement is what we all share/ it's just that some have more legroom." Spare, astute "socialist one-liners" accrue sentence by sentence in the seven longish works (with a coda of short poems) of this third collection, elaborating a complex field of micro- and macropolitical concerns. Somewhere in the space between
Reviewed on: 09/01/2003
Genre: Nonfiction