Headlines

John Crouse puts language into overdrive in Headlines, a sequence of prose poems which are not so much ""headlines"" as the graffiti of a semiotic trickster on speed: ""History Of The World One Big Sprawling Sentence. Switched Bundles Of Nothing Occur Uttering Words Events, Thats The Secret Blaze Of Glory. Liberty Hence A Doctrine Hence A Thrust. A Most Vital Shitjam Of Thorns Horns A Livingmost. Read My Lips No Flyzone. Blaze Of Glory Elongates Apex Twin Bitches Return As Novel."" The misanthrope-meets-sociologist aspect of this work recalls the Bruce Andrews of the Reagan years. Crouse is no tentative theorist, and he uses his basic mode all capped words, minimal punctuation, disregard for normal sentence structure to take his readers on thrash-speed thrill-sport travels of microtonal verbal experience, masking behind information overload and synapse-swarming syntax. (Sept.)