Mark Spitzer writes with a ferocity and intensity not seen in much of today's poetry. His words are intellectually aggressive as they grab the reader by the throat saying, 'Open your eyes and your mind will follow.' --Illogical Muse
Only dumbf__ks will not read this book and exult. Spitzer's furious epic is a supremely satisfying blasphemous gorgeous cantankerous yowl for a generation of hep-infected-cats neutered by American supremidiocy. He has managed quite un-nicely, thank you! to tweeze every bloody splinter from our polluted and polluting culture. His Missouri misery odyssey ra[n]ges from big bass to big brass, from celebrity bodies to celestial bodies, from a micro-war between the blustering hero-narrator and local developers bent on greed and eco-genocide to a macro-war between the US government and practically everybody else, including its own soldiers. Most rewarding is Spitzer's renovated language that, read and screamed aloud, bends and twists and curls the tongue so erotically that orgasm is a valid conclusion. Really. --Debra Di Blasi, author of The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions<br /><br />Triage of daily life and text, mines in the headlines, flat faced mutancy in the details of man's folly and avarice, rapacity and ballsack confusion, set against an individual pastorale amid the cowpies, text addled by brush, "angry vines," and "channel cats with mongo backs," sluiced with wind and wave, in turn set against the maw of what increasingly seems to no longer exist, green world of birdsong, face of simple intention, word strong as bough, and so forth (and yet . . .). Text with an edge like a serial killer's holiday in a target rich environment, the monkeyward of Washington, or the plains of Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate board rooms and city council meetings clotted with preening inanities in the form of the human, etc., the text's language slick as a lineman's clit, doffing a nod to the warbled wordexitry of Burgess and the wee ones who sleep in eaves, all woven with the witchery of electronic missives, condensing words to mush. Spitzer in battle-rut (Moloch panting beneath.) --Skip Fox, author of At That<br /><br />Ultimately, Age of the Demon Tools is less concerned with stanzaics or tone than with cutting a wide swath of social lambasting. Spitzer unapologetically targets Bush and his cronies, Anna Nicole Smith, Spam Mail, "obese flugging slugs" lazing on the "McCouch," and self-absorbed "me-pod" listeners, to name a sliver. Some readers might argue that he lacks control and gives itno the excesses of his ear (and his crassness), and as a result, the poems lack rehetorical focus and emotional and intellectual depth. But that type of reading misses the point. America is excessive, sprawling, crass, and, at times, socially unjust. If one role of a writer is to be a social conscience and a catalyste for change, then that role requires candor and urgency at the expense of palatability. --Rain Taxi Review
Product Description
You have to slow down, and absorb calmly, the procession of gritty, pointillist gnarls of poesy that Mark Spitzer wittily weaves into his book. Just the title, Age of the Demon Tools, is so appropriate in this horrid age of inappropriate technology you know, corruptly programmed voting machines, drones with missiles hovering above huts, and mind reading machines looming just a few years into the demon-tool future. When you do slow down, and tarry within Spitzer's neologism-packed litanies, you will find the footprints of bards such as Allen Ginsberg, whose tradition of embedding current events into the flow of poesy is one of the great beacons of the new century. This book is worth reading if only for the poem "Unholy Millenial Litany" and its blastsome truths. Ed Sanders.
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