Jeremy Reed’s new collection, which I picked up after reading it in Tears in the Fence, where he sounded like he’d only part left the 60s poetry scene. On the surface the collection wheels spectacularly and with such fluency (Reed is obviously a creative type), but beneath that – and I think Silliman would call this the poems’ effect, how shifts in a poem can combine, there is anger. This took a while for me to realize, the language was so unusual, by the poem Fukt. Perhaps a dead friend whom he took acid with. The puzzle this collection asks is whether the psychedelic form he is using is alienated and alienating, fit to purpose, or parodic. A line in Fukt reads:
no connection between person and thing