T. Cole Rachel, a self-described “weird midwestern kid who dreamed all his life of running away to the big city,” writes poems about the act of survival. His locales are specific (the Midwest, rural America) and his voice (the adolescent outsider) recognizable, but, as Bret Easton Ellis writes, he “makes the mundane feel urgent, fresh, vital. This is powerful writing.” “The energy and precision and respect [Rachel] brings to [his subjects] is heart-stoppingly affirmative.” — Edmund White
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stinging in this Portrayl of Bliss,
This review is from: Surviving the Moment of Impact (Paperback)
It isn't everyday someone publishes a young poet who also happens to be a good poet. But Soft Skull has successfully come through with Rachel's first book, _Surviving the Moment of Impact_. The book takes you on a tour of Rachel's childhood without falling prey to the whimsical, the boring, or all that has been said before in all of those same boring phrases and stanzas. Finally the reader can open their arms to welcome the midwest we've so often heard about and truly grow to understand it and love it.Rachel tends to post-modernism with a yard stick, marking a step beyond it with his use, or I should say non-use, of punctuation. Imagine being carried through a poem without one mark to tell you to stop or start but yet you hold perfect meter and cadence throughout. It's downright remarkable. Sure, the likes of Frank O'Hara and others made a stamp of offing punctuation, but Rachel is the first to walk you through a poem at his own pace and with such incredible images and sounds. Rachel does sometimes use punctuation, but what he really depends on, more than anything, is a love and understanding that admire as beauty in all he sees. This poet, for obviously being so well read and well taught (a student of the recent National Book Award winner Albert Goldbarth's at Wichita State), never makes the reader feel unintelligent. When he talks of being poor, the reader neither leans to being rich or poor, we are just there, wherever Rachel would like us to be. When he is holding a journal with pink and purple writing within and a lock we could break open so easily with even a thought, I was in the backseat of that car whistling along with the radio, too. As tempting as it is to crawl into Rachel's life, and I expect as equally easy, we walk beside the poet, perhaps perched on his shoulder eyeing the midwest as one a great horizon we'd like to one day leave too. But leave for where? He still admires his home and doesn't bestow any ill rememberances to us, just the belief that there is more fairness over the horizon and I hope he has found that now. This book deserves incredible praise. It's reviewers, Breat Easton Ellis, Henry Flesh, Scott Heim, and Edmund White, all eloquently propel the utmost respect and thanks to Rachel for his delicious book of poems. This young poet is one poet I will keep reading for every book to come. No matter where he wanders, I don't mind going along.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Oklahoma Getaway,
By Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: Surviving the Moment of Impact (Paperback)
Surviving the Moment of Impact has a cute photo of poet T. Cole Rachel on the cover, on some autumnal brown lawn, you can almost smell the frost coming in across the plains. The photo's been hacked up and re-dispersed, which makes it harder to read, but maybe it gives a clue as to the sort of book this is, and of course it always reflects the violent fracture of the "point of impact" to which the book serves as a survival guide. "They're much easier to deal with this way," Rachel tells us, in a poem slash essay "On Collaging Childhood Photographs" in the book's central section. Albert Goldbarth, it appears, was his poetry mentor and something of Goldbarth's diverting wit and humor shows in the otherwise serious and lyrical writing we find on display here.
I don't read this sort of book often--not often enough, perhaps, so maybe this is just a taste of what I've been missing, and if so, I have wasted my life. For Rachel, poetry serves as a kind of evidence, a transcription of real life events which the poem simultaneously triggers and reacts to, and as such, I found myself over and over again caught up in life, as opposed to the transport into language that is the raison d'etre for so many other books of poetry I read. When the writing is as skilled and, in fact, inspired as this, it's like meeting a person, encountering his mind, and I'm all for it now. There's a helpful roadmap in the back of the book called "The Project of the Poem," in which our guesses are all confirmed, yes, the poem is about memory and forgetting, about a flat landscape scraped by a putty knife, about love and desire, about the absolute alterity of being gay in a Christian land, about class and money and "heat,/ suffocation, wanting and all other forms/ of delicious agony." I actually don't think that Rachel has gotten to the bottom of his interest in old photographs, that perhaps a book of lyric genius isn't the place to argue it all out, but what he gives us are suggestive fragments towards a larger understanding of the image. And how many writers can say even half as much? Surviving the Moment had me from the get go, convinced me of the absolute equivalence of poet and guy, thrilled me with its intimate understanding of Kathy Acker and David Wojnarowicz (excellent epigraphs from each). Some of the things he says shock me, others enchant. This book came out eight years ago and I would be happy to hear that T. Cole Rachel's working on another.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Relishing this Moment,
By
This review is from: Surviving the Moment of Impact (Paperback)
This is a beautiful, damaged portrait of an America you'll either know intimately, peripherally, or not at all yet you have ideas about it based solely on living in this country and hearing other people's jokes. No matter which of the 3 pertain to you, I think you'll find this speaking to you. If you know it, you're going to know it in your bones. If you know it peripherally, you'll recognize everyone. If you don't know it but you always enjoy a "white trash" joke, you'll find a humanity here that you've yet to consider. If you need a cinematic cue, think of this as the Boys Don't Cry culture in free verse.
Still, it's more than that. We're not just our own time and place, but ultimately we're ourselves within a time and place. If you remember the Valentine's Day class exchange rituals of elementary school, you'll be able to step inside this book. I find this to be a beautiful, nuanced look into the many small tragedies and dreams that make a life. Whereas the Spoon River Anthology (Signet Classics) takes a stoic grouping of characters to paint a judgemental portrait of a small town, Surviving the Moment of Impact makes no such judgements. It's no less harsh, and it's certainly not sentimental, but it feels real. It doesn't feel like someone starting to write with an end-point or an agenda already in mind. It feels like tales of a life being lived by a great poet. Two thumbs up to Soft Skull Press for getting this out there! Their website is well worth a visit. I bought this because I found it there and thought it had potential. Just look around and take a chance on whatever seems like it might be calling your name. I've read this book 5 times now.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
it is summer when we fuck so she crawled under the house and died they're much easier to deal with this way, mummified people should know when they are trying to kill you sometimes it happens like this Read the first page New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
it is summer when we fuck so she crawled under the house and died they're much easier to deal with this way, mummified people should know when they are trying to kill you sometimes it happens like this Read the first page New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 4
books:
1
book
cites this book:
- Close to the Knives by David Wojnaroqicz on page 38
- Life After God by Douglas Coupland on page 20
- Bodies of Work by Kathy Acker on page 38
- Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg on page 2
- Bend, Don't Shatter: Poets on the Beginning of Desire by T. Cole Rachel in Back Matter
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