Customer Reviews

Ms

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

 

 

Remember that capsule they sent into space with examples of earth art to show any aliens out there what it means to be human? I wonder what they'd think if they found this dazzling book on board. Magee's put the English through a cyclotron of contemporary American voicings and come out the other side with a souped-up language that feels big enough and fast enough to just about cover Where We Are Now. The title "MS" moves in a lot of directions--manuscript, multiple sclerosis, the gender-savvy "miz"--and the poems touch on all of these and then some, often in the same stanza. I especially like the way Magee takes quirks of the language like homonyms and puns and uses them to explore a crazy quilt of subjects most of us would never think to loop together. Like in "Daughters of the American Revolution," where he moves the word "wesson" from guns to cooking oil to black gold to blackness with the warp speed of a master turntablist. Or "Leave a Light On," which rings the changes on the meanings of "shaft" (think Isaac Hayes meets Lucky Charms). Or "P"--one guess where that starts--where a schoolyard rhyme gets hit with some seriously funny theory.

There's a deeply American rat-a-tat to these poems that owes a lot to hip-hop's verbal glee ("this is a fact check/from the girl at the hat check with a hatchet"). But Magee draws on whole families of vernaculars, black and otherwise, and manages to graft them onto wider poetic traditions in a way that seems totally natural:

"Death, maybe, isn't gluttonous, as in Donne-
it's more like someone says to Him, "You
want the rest of this cheeseburger?" and He
says, "I guess so."

or:

"the belles of St. Mary knell
'The Real Slim Shady.'"

Magee's out for more than just nyuks; these poems tackle some heavy questions about mortality, history and the way gender, ethnicity and race consciousness graffiti our personal manuscripts. "MS" trades fours with a good chunk of American culture and, by the time you close the covers, you half-believe it just might win. I hope this exciting collection finds the readers it deserves. Even on Uranus.

Stuttering turns into syncopation in this edgily engaging collocation of accents, attitudes, occasions. The poems in MS are provocative, certainly without idealization, the dollars-and-cents context of our grainy American dream. Mike Magee's detailed optical-ocular orbiting effects -- "other-wise / waning or adroitly loitering" -- make reading this collection a constant surprise.

---Susan Howe

Does the poet diagnose a medical condition or continue a feminist tradition? Is it a motor ship or a manuscript? A degree of science or a software appliance? Recklessly eyeballing Mike Magee's "grainy American dream," my
optic nerves jangle to the tune of jump-cut language, slurred and blurred words flashed on the screen of memory with a quick trigger finger on the universal remote. Magee's MS interrupts our programming with his alternative vision.

---Harryette Mullen

The discursively promiscuous clauses of these poems-cut generously with a slide-wit on the national symbols blared, dice up much of the lingering prosaic transparency of American Poetry (Inc.). Here's no monologic gnosis gnashing of "repressed subject" possibilities, while at the same time no fashionable duncing of the socially determinative either. This rhetor's got the apps (and multiplexed `mouth') to get you to the next level-Your Turn.

---Rodrigo Toscano

Michael Magee's MS is new music . . . a carnivalesque palimpsest of vision and ventriloquy, supple rhythm informed by Hiphop era ironies and an erudite grasp of postmodern poetics. This marvelous Century 21 ethnic American remix of personal history and society's mystery is both demanding and delightful. You need this book! Mr. Magee creates poems that tickle the ear and open a new window in the mind's eye. Read aloud. Think fast.

---Lorenzo Thomas