Customer Reviews

Age of the Demon Tools

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In a standard book review, this is where I'd try to relate Mark Spitzer's latest poetry collection, Age of the Demon Tools (ahadada books, 60 pages, $12.95), to his other books. I can't.

In a standard book review, this is where I'd attempt to place Age of the Demon Tools into a poetical evolutionary progression, comparing it to earlier books by other poets, shooting for a bookmarks magazine-type of sidebar you could clip n' carry with you on your next safari to Border's. I can't.

I can't do either of those things because this is not a standard book review. It can't be, because Age of the Demon Tools is a wholly unique, totally original book of verse. No kidding, people; Spitzer, like an erudite Huck Finn of the 21st Century, takes us out into the Indian Territory. It's vision quest time.

This is truly uncharted country. Stanzas creep and slither across pages like psychedelic snakes. The reader is bathed in a kaleidoscope of images and characters---a "tiny christ", an "anorexic possum/retching in the ethersphere", "Captain Tracheotomy". Words are spelled phonetically or flat-out invented---"a Flapalooza of Flinging Fladdle!/Uvulas of Udder Grubbage!"---as Spitzer riffs off the King's English like a jazz master bending musical scales to serve his vision. This is a new, intriguing language.

But this isn't mere surrealism for surrealism's sake. Sandwiched between the lights and sounds is telling commentary on a modern society drowning in its own bile. The corporatization of America, the Iraq War and the systematic destruction of the environment are among the topics addressed in honest and engaging ways.

Hear that? It's the sound of Mark Spitzer breaking new poetic ground. Buy this book now, so you can say you were There When It Happened.

Read this aloud, standing up and alone, or risk missing the experience completely.

I once heard that the two things that can't be taught in creative writing were metaphor and rhythm. If that's true, Spitzer came out of the lifeshoot endowed with extraordinary gifts. Poems here live in the mouth instead of on the page; and the physical pages seem only to present poems out of obligation, barely keeping them from running off the paper as the form literally follows gravity - down and to the right.

Everything about the book is awesomely wrong. The sections, as if about to be replaced by subordinates, have their own sections, which are right-justified procedural poems that suggest the books maddness comes from outside instead of in. The poems themselves are not marked by titles, but instead (and probably in a small effort to avoid comparisons to Dickinson) are marked by asterisks; and even then, several times, the tone and content of consecutive poems run together and disrupt the category distiction of "poem." Words are invented to suit the sound, punctuation is delightfully overused, taboo is finds itself revered instead of marginalized, and nearly every formal convention Spitzer establishes is at sometime or another broken (a few "normal" stanzas sprinkled throughout, for example, lend a few well-chosen moments a certain seriously-treated silence). Despite all of this, Spitzer avoids the powerful suction of the "Postmodern" label with shear emotional intensity and consistency.

More than anything, the book is music. And more than any other living poet, Spitzer is a master of sound. Spitzer's sound has been evolving in subsequent books. And it has all been for this. Sound has been an important part of his previous works, most notably his "Junkyard" poems and "The Pigs Drink from Infinity;" but it has always been controlled. Here, it is released. Any reader who reads this silently, hell, even in a whisper, is both missing a one of the only truly unique poetic experiences available and doing Spitzer (and themselves) a disservice.

Spitzer breaks away from the pack here.