Customer Reviews

A Boilermaker for the Lady

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Truly an extraordinary book that I recommend to every lover of poetry with a sense of humor. Yannantuono is a remarkable talent - a supurb wordsmith with a furtile imagination and a unique way of looking at life, who doesn't take himself too seriouly. In fact, judging from the picture on the rear cover, (the half naked author is about to feed a dog a martini while both wear cone dog collars), he doesn't take himself seriously at all. While I thoroughly enjoyed the entire book,(including the serious poems), I most enjoyed the author's limericks, palindromes, and poems on unusual subjects, which reminded me strongly of Ogden Nash. You don't see poems with titles like, "Lines Written While Adding Three Inches to My Penis" or "And Our Brains Have Sailed Away", every day. I look forward to the author's next book.

A Boilermaker for the Lady is one of the best American books of poety to come out in years, if not decades. Those of us who are sick of academic hack poetry, and the incestuous idiocy of what passes for poetry in the pages of the increasingly insipid New Yorker, can take heart. Fred Yannantuono has given us reason to hope. Maybe all is not lost. Maybe there is room left on the Ark.

The poems here are at turns funny, clever, moving, adroit. They are always deceptively sophisticated. The tones are varied; there are times you think maybe more than one poet is at work. Yannantuono is nothing if not versatile. There are palindromes and limericks, since the author is most fond of humor. Myself, I prefer the more serious poems, like White Christmas and The Return of Madame La Hoya. No matter what your particular preference might be, I recommend this little volume to the stars.

Imagine. A poet who can make you laugh, like James Merrill. The photo on the back is all by itself worth the price of admission. A poet's sensibilities caught in a glance. Buy this book!

The way this writer doth think
makes me glad that I am not his shrink,
for within the first hour
'neath my couch I would cower,
and later be driven to drink!

All seriousness aside, this slim volume is a delight for all those with a well developed sense of humor and a deep vocabulary. Better have a dictionary handy, tho, for this book is sprinkled with terms like "orrery", "philoprogenitive" and "cathexis".
Excuse me well I go and buy a bigger dictionary.

So who's the lady, the dark lady sitting at the end of the bar, her fingers swirling a shot glass, her eyes withdrawn into black pools? 'The one who looks at you, but never seems to see you?

Why, she's Fred Yannantuono's Muse, of course, the one who makes him do funny stuff, even while he's dead serious. Like Shakespeare, he does puns (there's one on UpdikeJs name that'll have you assuming the foetal position). He attacks the serious problems of life-like shoes-

I put them on. I took a step. I
took them off real quick.
A most disgusting bellyache it
nearly made me sick.
If forced to dance a conga
line through hellfire's
hottest throes
I wouldn't put on sandals
straps between the toes.

As well as dogs ("Hounds exist to make you toe the mark. / I'd swap her fir a wombat or a moose"), recipes for chili ("When it comes to making chili I I do something some think silly. I Briefly, I don't know the meaning I Of toning
down the beaning"), and cigars ("At twelve o'clock we broke out the cigars, I Poured ourselves a shot to loose the tongue, I And lay beneath a flowerbed of stars."

Fred takes his objects, and subjects, where he finds them. He's the scatterbrain, to paraphrase De Vries, with plenty of brains to scatter. That's why the poems in this brilliant debut collection are, so often, about themselves, their innards and hidden organs-literally, as with some of the funniest palindromes I've ever read. You'll have to come up with the cover price to get these, but I'll give readers just one, to whet their appetite
("Sophisticated Courtship Palindrome": "Evolution: dog, otter, a man on amaretto-God? No. I tu love." Simply uncanny.

This collection gives an unusual impression of brash youthfulness, as well as an assured thought-out maturity and reflection. That may be because this poet his career midway up the slope of Mount Parnassus . 0bviously, this is a source of nothing but strength in his output. Listen to his "Prayer to the Moon," which I will slice a sublime quarter-segment from:

0 moon, 0 mother moon,
Sailing through the slipstream
of the stars,
Spin me on your orrery and rings
In your pale protectorate of bars.

In reading such lines, one finds a hush, a silence, as though we were glimpsing beyond their, yes, bars, the hush in which galaxies were made.

The last word's a limerick, of course. Here's Fred's:

Free verse is a waste of our time.
To me what makes metrics
sublime
Is the certain sensation
In versification
Of prosody rhymed on a dime.

I urge you to purchase this superb collection and see for yourself the range of verse, metrical or otherwise, he is capable of striking. And if that lady at the end of the bar wants a double, give her what she wants. She'll be worth it.

--Particle

Reprinted with written permission from The Light Quarterly.

The dedication page is worth the price of admission

Wait for his upcoming novels!

This book is absolute genius. . . from start to finish, an absolute delight! I can only hope there will be another book from this amazing wordsmith.

When I realized that the undisputed King Of Palindromes had a book out, I had to have it. Yannantuono does not disappoint. Happy Birthday to me! I'll keep this book close at hand when I need a sip of levity.