Customer Reviews

The Nervous Filaments

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A sophisticated deconstruction of the self, the past, american culture, masculine energy, art, film and more, this book achieves a devastating and unsettling emotional logic all of its own. Utterly different from his other work yet retaining the same kinetic, brazen music and imagery we have come to expect from him, the book is highly "readable" for those that don't insist on the linear. A break through book.

David Dodd Lee's fourth full-length collection of poetry, The Nervous Filaments, is a transcendent step into parallel sphere. Lee wastes no time in asserting his right to hold and examine the reader, the world, in fact, upside down, backwards, by the heels. When he says "I could see ambulance spelled/backwards" we know the emergent world isn't in Lee's rear view mirror, but he's facing it head-on, all the while trying to make sense of the incoming messages, as frantically jumbled as they appear. In a gesture towards Günter Grass's Tin Drum, "I could see the eels spilling/out of the horse's head," Lee prepares the reader for a view of the disturbingly tragic world of survival, the one in which we all traverse but often fail to see. He points out, however, "...here is your/story/coming from a different direction." Indeed, we meet Lee at an unlikely intersection, but it is an intersection worth exploring as each poem reveals new vistas. "After all that's your head in the window/looking out/through rain/through snow." Certainly. Isn't that why we're here?

LOVELESS, THE GRAVEL

Here is your
story, in my

horizonless competence,

a nevertheless fine
kettle of

mockingbirds

I could see ambulance spelled
backwards

I could see the eels spilling
out of the horse's head

a crawdad sits in a cold
pool importantly praying

(cumulus nimbus)

and here is your
story

coming from a different direction

a couple of shaved ideas

I got a hold of one in a class. It seems there is a disingenuous tone about it. Like someone with attention deficit disorder is trying to improve but is a prisoner of himself and just can't.

I found no unifying theme. Like a quilt but no pattern, and you so wish it was soft instead of scratchy and threadbare.