Customer Reviews

A Handmade Museum

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

 

 

Mina Loy's poems were first ridiculed as waste when published in America. She was before her time, as they say. Coultas, too, ventures into unknown territory daring to collapse genres, contain the urban and rural and allow language to move along the surface of the ordinary. The first part of the book is an honest sketch of experiences in the Bowery at its most basic level. In the garbage, treasures and mere trash are discovered. It is what it is, and Coultas gives us a chance to see the world through her eyes. She also presents a world on the stage, behind the camera lens, projected and false. It can be manipulated, the world and the words that shape it.

I loved this book! It gives an honest look at parts of this country that are so often ignored. I especially liked a poem called "To Write it Down." I tried to read it outloud to someone but couldn't finish because I knew I was going to cry. This poet's work is like no other I have ever read and I found it very inspiring. I feel that reading this book has given me a new way of looking at ordinary details.

The book is alright, not something I would have purchased on my own, but I needed it for a college writing class and it was very helpful for that. It shipped in I think 3 days which was really nice because I needed it quick.

Brenda Coultas is a poet of today. Trendy, experimental, half-way between poetry and prose, with topics that celebrate low-income inner-city culture, as well as a nostalgic look at her rural past, A Handmade Museum is exactly what poetry needs to appeal to a broader, less-educated, readership. Her poetry does not require or warrant deep analysis. It skims the surface of a gritty ghetto world, assigning it a beauty and dignity that appeals to current liberal ideals.

With little concern for craft or conciseness, Coultas' poetry reads like the scribbled notes of an earnest undergraduate working on a quirky thesis project. Of course, the accolades are heaped on top of Coultas. On the back cover of A Handmade Museum, Brenda Coultas is deemed by Bradford Morrow as a "spiritual archaeologist of dumpsters and farm fields." Lisa Jarnot praises her "rural-urban-lyric-documentary" style.

The gushing praise Coultas receives is not surprising given our current taste in poetry. I admit to a biased aversion to prose poems, a lament for the lack of craft and technique in much of today's popular poetry, and a preference for poems which look inside the poet, seeking to understand the mystery of self, rather than document what the poet sees outside themselves. Brenda Coultas is great at creating precisely the kind of poetry I hate, but others love.

Does this mean that anyone can call themselves a "poet" no matter how awful they are? Shame on Coffee House for putting their money into this when there are true poets out there, with voices of honesty, compassion, and wisdom. This is pretentious drivel, parading as the musings of an "artiste" who presents the Midwest and the homeless as something to be snickered at. These are hardly poems-- but run-on sentences plopped together, without any imagery or idea to sustain them, coming at the reader like the sloppy alcoholic musings of a narcisstic. It is infuriating that books like this choke the market, and that trees are killed to make them.